Engaging with the reader in research articles in English: Variation across disciplines and linguacultural backgrounds

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2021.02.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Engagement in research articles is analysed across two disciplines and two cultures.

  • Engagement is more prominent in linguistics than in economics research articles.

  • Proximity is more salient in linguistics and positioning in economics articles.

  • Intercultural variation concerns the choice of specific engagement markers.

  • Variation in engagement is more significant across disciplines than across cultures.

Abstract

This paper studies engagement in English-medium research articles across two disciplines, linguistics and economics, and two linguacultural backgrounds, Anglophone and Czech, in order to explore how disciplinary and linguacultural considerations affect the choice, frequency and distribution of engagement markers in the construal of persuasive academic discourse. The contrastive analysis applying Hyland & Jiang's (2016) modified model of engagement is carried on a corpus of 60 refereed research articles published in international and local academic journals within these disciplines and linguacultural backgrounds. The findings indicate the existence of cross-disciplinary variation, as authors of linguistics research articles employ significantly more engagement features than those of economics research articles. Moreover, linguistics research articles show a preference for proximity engagement markers aiming at enhancing disciplinary solidarity, while economics research articles tend to prioritize positioning engagement features directing readers towards intended understandings and anticipating alternative interpretations. Intercultural variation, which is less significant and affects the frequency of use and choice of specific engagement markers, reflects divergences in linguacultural conventions, target audiences and contexts of publication. These results indicate the potential of this doubly contrastive approach to contribute towards an understanding of rhetorical choices in academic discourse. The study can have important pedagogic applications in efforts to support academic writers.

Introduction

Over the last three decades, there has been growing interest in the interactional dimension of academic discourse, triggered by the realization that the persuasive force of academic texts stems not only from the scientific knowledge they convey, but also, and probably no less importantly, from the skilful use of rhetorical and language choices resonating with the shared beliefs, expectations and conventions of a specific specialized discourse community (e.g. Sancho Guinda, 2019; Swales, 2004). When endeavouring to convince readers of their claims and views, academic writers strive to cast a credible representation of themselves and to establish solidarity with readers by acknowledging their presence and negotiating potential alternative views (Hyland, 2014; Myers, 1989). The rhetorical and language devices which embody writer–reader interaction vary according to context, be it disciplinary, language or cultural, as it is the discourse community's specific epistemological and interpersonal conventions that determine what its members find convincing (Hyland, 2008). Thus, the study of discipline- and culture-related variation in the use of interactional resources in academic discourse is useful for deepening our insights into how academic persuasion is constructed in different contexts. This paper endeavours to contribute to this line of research by exploring variation in the use of engagement markers in English-medium research articles (RAs) across two disciplines (economics and linguistics) and two cultural backgrounds (Anglophone and Czech).

Engagement refers to the ways in which the writer overtly acknowledges the presence of the “reader-in-the-text” (Thompson, 2001) by “pulling [the readers] along with their argument, focusing their attention, acknowledging their uncertainties, including them as discourse participants, and guiding them to interpretations” (Hyland, 2005b, p. 176). This reader-oriented understanding of engagement is different from the concept of ‘engagement’ as used within Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal Theory, where it refers to the writer's attitude or opinion towards the message and other voices in the text and is thus closer to the notion of ‘stance’ within Hyland's (2005b) stance and engagement framework. Engagement is an essential aspect of academic persuasion, as it enables the writer to build a rapport with the reader, create an in-group relationship, indicate politeness, bring in the reader's voice and guide the audience towards intended interpretations. The various ways in which the writer can appeal to the readers and involve them in the construal of the argument are reflected in Hyland's (2005b) five categories of engagement features: reader-pronouns, questions, directives, personal asides and appeals to shared knowledge. These features help the writer achieve different goals: reader mentions and personal asides convey the feeling of community membership and solidarity, while questions, directives and appeals to shared knowledge allow the writer to engage in a dialogue with the reader's positions and beliefs, acknowledge alternative views and anticipate criticism, so as to eventually construe a sense of sharedness and agreement (e.g. Hyland, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, 2010; Lafuente-Millán, 2014; Hyland & Jiang, 2016; Sancho Guinda, 2019). Together with stance, engagement is one of the interactional resources (pertaining to Halliday's (1985) interpersonal metafunction) which have been investigated under the umbrella term of metadiscourse, i.e. the rhetorical and pragmatic devices that authors use to manage social interaction with readers by “tak[ing] up positions and align[ing] themselves with the readers in a particular context” (Hyland, 2005a, p. 4).

Previous research has provided convincing evidence that disciplinary and linguacultural constraints have a strong bearing on the choice of interactional metadiscourse, including engagement features. The impact of disciplinary conventions on the choice of interactional resources has been scrutinized across a spectrum of various disciplines, usually focusing on the genre of the RA, from a synchronic (e.g. Hyland, 2001, 2005b, 2014; Harwood, 2005; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland & Tse, 2004; McGrath & Kuteeva, 2012) and recently also from a diachronic perspective (e.g. Gillaerts & Van de Velde, 2010; Hyland & Jiang, 2016, 2018). These studies have revealed that the ways researchers in different disciplines construct persuasive argumentation differ as a function of the kind of knowledge transmitted, the disciplinary conventions of meaning-making and the expectations established in the discourse community in respect of the rhetorical strategies and linguistic resources employed in writer–reader interactions. This calls for further research to reveal more fine-grained distinctions in the repertoire of interactive means that scholars have at their disposal in different disciplines.

Cross-cultural research into resources conveying the writer's interaction with the reader has discussed the influence of various factors, such as the epistemological traditions, politeness conventions and the level of homogeneity of the national culture, focusing on divergences in the use of metadiscourse markers between, e.g. Finish and English (e.g. Mauranen, 1993), Spanish and English (e.g. Mur-Dueñas, 2008; Sheldon, 2009), Danish and English (e.g. Shaw, 2003), English and Italian (Molino, 2010), English and Chinese (e.g. Hu & Cao, 2015; Mu et al., 2015) and across several languages (e.g. Vassileva, 1998; Shaw & Vassileva, 2009). Less common, however, are publications exploring the use of interactional resources in English-medium RAs by L2 scholars published in an international and a national context (e.g. Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2014; Lafuente-Millán, 2014; Lorés-Sanz, 2011b, 2011a; Shaw, 2003; Yang, 2013) and studies scrutinizing non-published RAs by non-native writers (e.g. Bondi & Borelli, 2018; Lafuente-Millán, 2018). The findings of these studies suggest that non-published RAs and articles published in local English-medium journals tend to differ in interactional features from RAs by Anglophone authors published in international journals as they are typically marked by underuse of interactional resources. The English-medium discourse of non-Anglophone scholars thus shows signs of hybridisation, as it generally tends to reflect to some extent the discursive and rhetorical conventions of their original academic literacy, and at the same time bears signs of adjustment to conventions characteristic of Anglophone academic discourse (Pérez-Llantada, 2013; Gotti, 2012). Since non-Anglophone scholars are pressed to publish in English-medium high-impact journals, the presence of significant hybridization features and divergences in interaction from conventions expected in such journals may reduce their chances of having their research published internationally (Flowerdew, 2008). Thus, the academic writing instruction for expert and novice non-Anglophone scholars should be informed by investigation of how and to what extent the use of interactive features in the English-medium discourse of scholars from different linguacultural backgrounds diverges from the dominant Anglophone rhetorical tradition.

Within this growing body of contrastive research very few publications (but see Dahl, 2004; Fløttum et al., 2006; Lorés-Sanz, 2011a; Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2018) have addressed the issue of variation in the use of interactional resources in RAs from a doubly contrastive perspective, taking into consideration both discipline and linguacultural background, as factors that affect the choice of rhetorical and language resources employed by academic writers. This study applies this doubly contrastive approach to the analysis of engagement features which allow the writer to “construct an audience” (Hyland, 2019: XIII) by addressing the readers, representing them as active participants in the argument and anticipating their positions and reactions to the claims and assertions being made.

As pointed out by Sancho Guinda (2019, p.1), engagement is under-researched in comparison with stance and the whole variety of interactional resources available in academic discourse. Previous work on engagement often focused only on the contribution of specific engagement features to the build-up of persuasive argumentation and carving the writer's authorial style. Thus, Swales et al.'s (1998) and Hyland's (2002b) discourse-analytical and interview-based investigations into the role of directives in academic discourse have shown that, despite their potentially face-threatening nature, directives contribute to the clarity and succinctness of the text and are instrumental in positioning the readers by directing their attention to aspects relevant to the progress of the argument. Hyland (2002a) has applied a similar approach to the study of questions, concluding that there is cross-disciplinary and cross-genre variation in the way writers use questions to explicitly involve the reader in the discourse by organizing the text, indicating the writer's purposes and expressing claims. Several studies (e.g. Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2013; Harwood, 2005; Kuo, 1999; Sheldon, 2009; Tang & John, 1999; Vassileva, 1998) have evidenced the role of reader pronouns in creating a sense of in-group belonging and agreement. Yet most previous work (e.g. Hyland & Tse, 2004; McGrath & Kuteeva, 2012; Mu et al., 2015; Mur-Dueñas, 2011; Qin & Uccelli, 2019) has considered engagement as a variable in the taxonomy of interactional metadiscourse, usually without discriminating among the five categories of engagement identified by Hyland (2005b). It is only recently that engagement has been subjected to more comprehensive research (e.g. Hyland, 2014; Hyland & Jiang, 2016; Jiang & Ma, 2019; Lafuente-Millán, 2014; Sancho Guinda, 2019), which has led to a refinement of the taxonomy of engagement resources and a better understanding of the rhetorical effect achieved by the different categories of engagement. However, while some of these studies have investigated engagement in applied linguistics, to the best of my knowledge there is no comprehensive study of engagement in RAs in the field of economics.

Adopting an ESP genre analysis perspective (Swales, 1990), this study draws on Connor's (2004) intercultural rhetoric approach to the study of written discourse in social interaction across linguacultural backgrounds. I use Hyland's (2005b, 2014) engagement framework to explore intercultural variation in engagement markers in a specialized corpus of economics and linguistics English-medium RAs by Czech and Anglophone authors published in international and national academic journals. The choice of linguistics and economics as disciplines under consideration was motivated by the fact that they represent different areas of the soft sciences spectrum (i.e. social sciences and humanities), in which the social construction of knowledge follows different patterns and methodologies, and therefore they are likely to show divergences in the rhetorical and language devices used to manage writer–reader interaction. A comparison between the Czech and Anglophone academic discourse conventions shows some divergencies which may potentially impact the English-medium RAs of Czech scholars. Formed under the influence of German and Slavonic epistemologies and literacies, Czech academic discourse is oriented towards the establishing of authority through presentation of disciplinary knowledge and theorizing; it shows a tendency to approach the issues under consideration from a general perspective and a preference for a writer-oriented, depersonalized style associated with the use of impersonal constructions and the exclusive ‘editorial we’ (Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2013; Čmejrková & Daneš, 1997). In this it differs from Anglophone academic conventions typically characterised by a more reader-friendly attitude and a higher level of interactivity (Hyland, 2005b; Thompson, 2001).

The contribution of this investigation lies in the doubly contrastive perspective adopted in the analysis of the impact of discipline and culture on the choice of engagement resources in the genre of RAs. To the best of my knowledge, it is also the first study exploring the full range of engagement features in English-medium RAs by Czech authors and applying the modified model of engagement (Hyland & Jiang, 2016) from a cross-disciplinary and intercultural perspective. In addition, it compares engagement in English medium RAs published in two different contexts of publication (international high-impact journals and national journals) in order to identify possible divergences in interactive resources which might affect the chances of L2 (Czech) authors to have their research results published in an international context. Endeavouring to bring new insights into the interplay of factors affecting persuasion in an academic context, this investigation addresses the following research questions:

  • 1)

    Is there disciplinary variation between linguistics and economics RAs in the use of engagement markers to stress collective solidarity and perform interactional positioning?

  • 2)

    What are the reasons for the existing divergences in the use of engagement markers in linguistics and economics RAs?

  • 3)

    Is there intercultural variation in the use of engagement markers in RAs published in international and national English-medium journals?

Section snippets

Corpus

The analysis of engagement was carried out on a specialized corpus, which comprises 60 single-authored English-medium linguistics and economics RAs published in six linguistics and six economics journals in the period 2010–2017 (five articles per journal). The corpus was subdivided into two disciplinary sub-corpora compiled according to the same criteria to ensure their comparability following the principles of tertium comparationis (Connor & Moreno, 2005). So as to identify recurrent

Results and discussion

Overall, the results of the quantitative cross-disciplinary analysis summarised in Table 2 show that engagement features are significantly more prominent in linguistics RAs than in economics RAs (LL-G2 65.3383, p-value <0.001). This concurs with the highly argumentative and interpretative character of knowledge in humanities, which urges writers to engage more intensely with readers to construe solidarity, anticipate criticism and acknowledge alternative views. In the linguistics sub-corpus the

Conclusions

This study has adopted a doubly contrastive approach for the investigation of cross-disciplinary and intercultural variation in linguistics and economics English-medium RAs written by Anglophone and Czech scholars. The results have shown that there is significant cross-disciplinary variation in the ways engagement markers are used across the two disciplinary contexts. Although the RAs from both disciplines displayed the whole range of engagement features, it was found that linguistics RAs

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation grant 17-16195S Persuasion Across Czech and English Specialised Discourses.

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research interests include English for academic and specific purposes and political discourse. She has published the books Analysing Genre: The Colony Text of UNESCO Resolutions (2009) and Coherence in Political Speeches (2011).

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