Core vocabulary items (e.g. thing, way) are often viewed as the enemy of effective academic writing, and style guides and textbooks often advise against using them. However, their bad reputation seems to stem from a single-word perspective that ignores the rich phraseological units that such items tend to figure in. In this study, we focus on the core vocabulary lemma thing to investigate the extent

This study examined eight measures of syntactic complexity across published research article part-genres (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and three social science disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Economics). The corpus of 240 complete texts was analyzed using a modified version of the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (SCA), and the measures were compared across disciplinary

Student performance on assignments is of growing international concern. Some of the difficulties that students have with crafting their university assignments are due to the demonstrated complexity of academic writing in different text types. Previous work in this area has mostly examined complexity at the sentence and clause level; however, more recent studies indicate that complexity at the level

This article investigates the discourses of professional identities and linguistic capital formation communicated by international scholars in the STEM disciplines in the US university context. In so doing, the study examines interviews of 17 such individuals and identifies two key discursive processes: the formation of a marketable self and the enactment of the legitimacy of World Englishes. The first

This paper investigates how the language of instruction in Dutch higher education (Dutch versus English) affects speech production by L1 Dutch-speaking lecturers. In a pairwise design, three young lecturers that were highly proficient in English gave two comparable lectures each (L1 Dutch and L2 English). Results show that the L1 Dutch lectures were consistently given at slightly higher syllabic speech

Plagiarism is a complex issue, torn between theory and practice, expectation and reality, and developmental and ethical concerns. However, in terms of student/teacher perceptions and practices, most plagiarism research has focused on English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) settings, with little to no research into English medium instruction (EMI) in non-Western locales. Therefore, using a combination

Local grammars have been reported to have the potential to facilitate English language teaching. This study explores this potential by applying local grammars into the teaching of discourse acts that are frequently performed in academic writing. For demonstration, the study focuses on the teaching of one particular discourse act, i.e., exemplification, and argues that the teaching procedure presented

Review genres (e.g., literature review, critical review) are useful for developing students’ abilities to evaluate literature critically; they have been widely used in university contexts as assessment tasks. The ‘news and views’ article is one such review genre which is often included in science journals and which is increasingly used as an assessment task in graduate science courses. Published ‘News

Due to the paucity of attention to research article (RA) abstracts, particularly from a diachronic perspective, this study investigates the changes in the representation of authorial presence through first person pronouns in RA abstracts, with data sampled from four applied linguistics journals between 1990 and 2019. The findings indicate that the representation of authorial presence tends to be shaped

In this ‘Researching EAP Practice!’ paper, I reflect on the experience of embedding learner-initiated enquiry into an in-sessional EAP course and argue that the process can be viewed as a continuous exploration of learners’ needs. First, I explain the rationale for adopting Exploratory Practice (EP)-a form of practitioner research-to position EAP undergraduates at a UK university as learner-researchers

EAP courses by their very nature are designed to help students understand and engage with academic language. Yet what if EAP practices are too far removed from academic discourse that their relevance is compromised? For better or worse, EAP teachers in Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) environments often draw on EAL grammar resources to supplement the development of their situated, content-reliant

3 MT presentations have emerged as an important academic genre, helping graduate students to present disciplinary knowledge to wide audiences. While previous research has investigated the structuring of presentations, little is known about the rhetorical features students employ to persuade their diverse listenership. In this study, we draw on Hyland’s (2005) stance and engagement framework to explore

Responding to the limited research on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers, and especially in the context of ‘expanding circle’ countries, this study aimed to explore Iranian EAP teachers’ teaching competencies and professional development (PD) activities as well as their perceptions about the roles, responsibilities, and challenges in teaching EAP. Data were collected from 105 university EAP

Stance, the extent writers intervene in a text to convey their personal attitudes and assessments, has long been a topic of interest to researchers of academic communication. Less studied, however, is how stance functions in spoken discourse. This would seem to be a particularly important issue in the Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT), a relatively new genre which captures the competitive and

Lexical bundles perform discourse functions and present differing levels of variability, with some slots replaceable by optional words. Incorporating both function and formulaicity perspectives is a promising approach to uncover certain features of these recurrent language patterns. Based on the variability measurement and functional taxonomy proposed by Biber (2009) and Biber et al. (2004), this study

Online translation has been freely available since the 1990s. In recent years its quality has been significantly improving, leading to instant translation which can easily be used as a reading or writing tool by students whose first language is not that of the institution where they study. For instance, students might use it to facilitate the composition of their essays in the language of instruction

Recent studies have argued for an understanding of voice in academic writing that goes beyond the expression of a ’personal’ voice to include writers’ sociohistorically-shaped and dialogically-negotiated agency. While several studies adopt this more expansive conception of voice, very few are situated within a pedagogical context. This study investigates thesis writing groups offered by a learning

The ability to draw on information from published sources within one’s own texts is an important skill in academic writing at the university level. This study analyzed the source integration techniques employed by 99 students on an integrated reading-to write placement exam at an American university, with particular focus on direct quotes and citation phraseology. Patterns of direct quotation varied

The importance and presence of notetaking in L2 educational contexts has gradually increased to a point where many now recognize notetaking as an essential academic skill for EAP preparatory and EMI courses worldwide. In order to meet the increasing demand for notetaking, materials writers and commercial publishers have designed and produced a number of notetaking textbooks. Despite their availability

Previous process-oriented research has predominantly investigated writing processes used by non-native speakers of English (L2) and found that more proficient writers allocate more time to planning and revising than less proficient writers who spend most of their time on formulating. There is so far no exploration of the process use by novice students at university and its relationship to writing performance

The practice of multilingual scholars who communicate research outcomes through the medium of English has been often explored in the context of training programmes designed to prepare these scholars to perform at internationally accepted standards in their fields of research. Building on the author’s experience of training professional researchers within the framework of an academic development MA

Lexical bundles have been found to be of considerable significance in academic texts. EAP instructors and students alike are thus encouraged to pay careful attention to these multi-word units in their teaching and learning process, respectively. There are several reports as to the discipline sensitivity of lexical bundles, but their variations within the same discipline are underexplored. This paper

The study reported in this article investigated the linguistic challenges that students face at an English medium instruction (EMI) university in Turkey. The aims of the study were (1) to describe the challenges that students experience in their EMI classes; (2) to investigate how these challenges vary according to individual student characteristics; and (3) to validate a research instrument designed

Critical reflection is considered a highly valued graduate attribute in higher education. Assignments that assess critical reflection skills often require students to focus on subjective and personal experiences, attitudes and dispositions. In addition to being typically less valued than objective and theoretical knowledge, reflective writing is often viewed as unstructured and ‘creative’, therefore

This study builds on existing genre analyses of research grant proposal abstracts by articulating a framework of move definitions that includes the sequencing and cycling of moves as well as their real-world or science orientation, and by exploring the tension between prototypicality and variation in these patterns. Two settings for national research grant competitions aimed at early-career scientists

The need for genre literacy is increasingly becoming evident in academic writing courses, particularly in the realm of research article (RA) writing. This paper documents RA genre-literacy informed revisions English as an Additional Language (EAL) graduate students applied to improve their term-paper assignments in the form of RAs following their participation in a series of genre-based research paper

This study uses a novel approach to describe modern English academic texts in terms of the amount and distribution of syntactic subordination, coordination and phrasal structures. Inconsistent results have been reported in previous scholarship regarding the trajectory of syntactic complexification based on English language backgrounds and linguistic proficiency of writers. For the first time, a combination

This article reports on a cross-sectional concurrent triangulation mixed methods study which has been conducted with 153 teachers involved in EMI programs at the University of Jaén, in southern Spain. Four types of triangulation have been employed to determine teachers’ perspectives through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews in 165 subjects, 28 Bachelor’s Degrees, and 8 Master’s Degrees

This paper reports the results of a review and analysis we conducted on 416 empirical articles (EAs) published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) over its lifespan (2002–2019). We present the results of the review and analysis across four broad themes, namely, (1) contexts and participants, (2) research foci and theoretical orientations, (3) research methodology and data sources

EMI (English-medium instruction) is increasingly prevalent and is an important site in which students are introduced to academic English. Research into classroom interaction in EMI in schools has been limited. Recent research into classroom interaction in EMI in higher education (Basturkmen & Shackleford, 2015; McLaughlin & Parkinson, 2018) has drawn on the construct of language-related episodes (LREs)

This paper investigates socialization to genre knowledge in a university in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic where the Russian language remains prevalent while Kazakh is still being revitalized and elaborated for academic purposes. The authors conducted a survey of postgraduate students (n = 53) and alumni (n = 57) along with focus groups (n = 26) in a single discipline in order to identify the

Previous research has explored the reasons for the overreliance on patchwriting in L2 writing. Fewer studies have examined pedagogical interventions designed to help these writers improve source integration skills, and these studies have mainly focused on teaching citation and/or paraphrasing skills. There is no research examining whether improving students’ accurate understanding of the source text

English as a medium of instruction in settings in which the listeners are L2 users has led to concern over learning outcomes for students as well as stereotyping of lecturers. Students report problems understanding their (L2) lecturers’ accent, but this concern has typically been treated as a sign of stereotyping towards non-native speakers. Low intelligibility, then, is seen as a product of prejudice

This paper examines the emergence of the doctoral thesis as a research genre and traces the development of thesis types and their macrostructures over time. We do this by examining the first doctorates that were awarded in English-medium universities and comparing them with doctorates that have been awarded more recently at the same universities. The data on which the study is based is a set of 100

Reading-comprehension abilities are inextricably linked to student success in academic contexts where reading serves as a primary means for conveying course content and displaying content learning (Anderson, 2015). The scarcity of studies on reading English for academic purposes in Vietnam, generally, and the reading habits of Vietnamese university students, more specifically, created the impetus for

This article explores learning transfer in an undergraduate engineering English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) course. The study followed 25 undergraduate engineering students over one academic year. It uses a mixed-methods approach that compares individual interviews and written assignment samples from an ESAP course for engineering students as well as assignment samples from subject-specific

Recent years have seen a spirited debate over whether there is linguistic injustice in academic publishing. One way that linguistic injustice might occur is if gatekeepers (e.g., peer reviewers and editors) judge the scholarly quality of academic writing more harshly if the writing does not meet expectations for international academic English, even if the content is good. We tested this with a randomized

Evaluation is pervasive in academic writing, and the past decades have witnessed a proliferation of research on writer's authorial evaluation in English academic writing. However, there is a lack of systematic review on evaluation research so far in the literature. To address this gap, this review aims to outline the major strands of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing as well

The trend towards the democratisation and sharing of academic research has brought about numerous changes in the type and number of genres researchers have to navigate. One recent addition to the palette of university genres is the Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT). The primary purpose of this article is to identify the principal features of 3MT presentations and examine the recontextualisation

This paper presents a corpus-based, pattern grammar-driven analysis of N1 of N2 constructions in academic written discourse. Different from other approaches to phraseology, the pattern grammar approach focuses on schematic grammatical patterns with a high degree of lexical variation rather than continuous word sequences or word sequences with a single open lexical slot. Using a corpus of research article

While many studies investigate the validity of TOEFL and IELTS scores, as well as stakeholders’ opinions about their usefulness for international student admission at Anglophone universities, little is known about their utility and relevance for admission in English medium instruction (EMI) programs at non-Anglophone universities. The purpose of this study is to explore various political, economic

The high lexical density and complex morphology of written standard English in academic and administrative contexts have raised concerns about their effect on reading proficiency across educational levels. This study provides empirical evidence of a serial multiple mediator model supporting the relationship between English L2 students’ morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, reading proficiency

A recent essay published in this journal by Swales (2019), calls for EAP genre analysts to pay more attention to (i) context and (ii) syntactic and phraseological patterns and uses. In this study, I address these two issues by taking a usage-based linguistics (UBL) approach to analyse how a molecular biologist, who writes in English as an additional language for research publication purposes, constructs

Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is a statistical analysis technique that has been widely adopted in marketing and strategic management disciplines, yet there is a paucity of application in language education research. This study applies PLS-SEM in an investigation of undergraduate students’ learning transfer by analysing their perceptions of learned skills they find transferable

Since the turn of the millennium, the internationalisation process that higher education institutions have engaged in worldwide has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of English-medium study programmes. In this regard, the academic writing produced in such contexts reveals that an increasing amount of student work, from classroom assignments to MA dissertations and PhD theses, is written in English

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate current EAP textbooks in terms of pedagogy of transition markers. Transition markers, e.g. moreover, therefore, are interactive metadiscourse devices which facilitate the reader’s understanding of the text (Hyland, 2005). Previous research shows that they pose a challenge to learners of academic English, who tend to overuse transition markers and misuse them

This paper explores OpenCourseWare (OCW) lectures as a key resource for EAP research and practice. The aim is to gain insights into the distinctive features of this technology-driven lecture format and how it may differ from the traditional classroom lecture not intended for an online audience. The analysis was structured into two parts. First, the digital affordances provided by two pioneers of the

We argue in the present paper that the (socio)linguistic description of grammatical complexity provides a necessary complement to predictive omnibus measures as an analytical approach for the study of student writing proficiency and development. That is, while omnibus measures can be effective for predicting student performance, we argue that a comprehensive grammatical description is required to fully

To prepare learners for the arduous tasks of simultaneously listening to and taking notes during (English medium instruction) EMI lectures, instructors have implemented explicit notetaking instruction with some degree of success. However, many such studies focus on improvements within the instructed group and do not compare results with those from control groups, leading to questions of generalizability

Over the last two decades, UK higher education institutions have performed successfully in the competitive global market of international student recruitment. A key explanatory factor is the increased provision of pre-sessional English preparation pathways, which allow universities to enrol students whose language proficiency at the time of application falls below programme requirements. Yet the scale

Academic writing is seen as an attempt to involve interaction between writers and readers; hence, academics are required to not only produce texts representing external realities but also use language to recognize, build and exchange social relations. The present study was conducted to analyze how native English speaker, Ph.D. students in the field of TEFL position their texts intertextually when writing

Syntactic complexity (i.e. the grammatical sophistication exhibited in language production) has been found to be positively correlated with formality. In viewing formality as a cline rather than as a dichotomy, the present study revisits previous claims about (in)formality in learner writing in relation to syntactic complexity. The use of commonly utilized measures of syntactic complexity is explored

The purpose of this study is to explore how Korean university undergraduate students use English prepositions embedded in frequently occurring multiword sequences, or lexical bundles, in their essays. Most prior research on prepositions has centered on prepositional phrases (PPs), including idiomatic expressions, identified on the basis of their structure and function. This study investigates prepositions

This article describes a large-scale analysis of dissertation macrostructures in the Faculties of Education at five major Canadian research universities. We draw on van Dijk (1980) and Paltridge (2002) in categorizing the global organizational patterns of 1,373 PhD dissertations and cross reference these patterns with each study’s research perspective. Although prior research has addressed thesis and

When writing academic texts, students often struggle with the nuances of cohesion, formality and conciseness. To realize these features, research has identified a powerful linguistic resource: grammatical metaphor (GM). Although GMs, and their most popular form, nominalizations, are critical for producing the language valued in academic contexts, there are few models for teaching them. This paper presents

The importance for writers of negotiating reader relationships is by now well-established; this is a particularly delicate area for students who are of course writing for a higher status audience. One aspect of this is the expression of obligation, which up to now has not received a great deal of attention. This study seeks to address this issue by investigating some key expressions of obligation occurring

There have been increasing calls for research attention to the linguistic realizations of rhetorical functions in academic writing. Research in this area has so far focused primarily on lexical and phraseological features. While numerous studies have investigated the relationship of syntactic complexity to language proficiency, development, and writing quality, research examining the rhetorical functions

This study examines the design and implementation of an online academic writing tutor offered to novice L2 writers. The tutor was designed to raise students’ genre awareness with regard to writing undergraduate research proposals, a largely underexplored genre. Two discipline-specific corpora of international research articles and student proposals were used to inform the design of the tutor and develop

This paper looks at how phrases are conceptualized in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) research and practice. It presents examples of phrases identified in academic discourse by EAP researchers, and compares these with examples of the phrases taught in EAP writing course books. The paper highlights the ways in which the forms and functions of phrases recommended for teaching by EAP researchers are

The purpose of this study is to analyse the use of the pronoun this as a cohesive encapsulator in a corpus of 130 engineering semi-popularization articles written in English. Three stages were followed to carry out the study: first analysis of the corpus, identification of cases to analyse, and quantitative and qualitative syntactic analysis of the textual segments encapsulated by the pronoun this