Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research PDF
Preview Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research
Second Language Learning and Teaching Andrzej Łyda Krystyna Warchał Editors Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research Second Language Learning and Teaching Series editor Mirosław Pawlak, Kalisz, Poland For furthervolumes: http://www.springer.com/series/10129 About the Series The series brings together volumes dealing with different aspects of learning and teaching second and foreign languages. The titles included are both monographs and edited collections focusing on a variety of topics ranging from the processes underlying second language acquisition, through various aspects of language learningininstructedandnon-instructedsettings,todifferentfacetsoftheteaching process, including syllabus choice, materials design, classroom practices and evaluation. The publications reflect state-of-the-art developments in those areas, they adopt a wide range of theoretical perspectives and follow diverse research paradigms. The intended audience are all those who are interested in naturalistic andclassroomsecondlanguageacquisition,includingresearchers,methodologists, curriculum and materials designers, teachers and undergraduate and graduate students undertaking empirical investigations of how second languages are learnt and taught. Andrzej Łyda Krystyna Warchał • Editors Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research 123 Editors AndrzejŁyda Krystyna Warchał Instituteof English University ofSilesia Sosnowiec Poland ISSN 2193-7648 ISSN 2193-7656 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-319-02525-4 ISBN 978-3-319-02526-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1 SpringerChamHeidelbergNewYorkDordrechtLondon LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2013953688 (cid:2)SpringerInternationalPublishingSwitzerland2014 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpartof the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,broadcasting,reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherphysicalway,andtransmissionor informationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Printedonacid-freepaper SpringerispartofSpringerScience+BusinessMedia(www.springer.com) Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Andrzej Łyda and Krystyna Warchał Part I Expert Writers Citation Practices of Expert French Writers of English: Issues of Attribution and Stance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet and Shirley Carter-Thomas A Comparison of Author Reference in the Spanish Context of Biomedical RAs Publication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Oana Maria Carciu Positive Self-Evaluation and Negative Other-Evaluation in NSs’ and NNSs’ Scientific Discourse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Grzegorz Kowalski A Context-Based Approach to the Identification of Hedging Devices and Features of Writer-Reader Relationship in Academic Publications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Maizura Mohd Noor, Jean Mulder and Celia Thompson Prospects of Indonesian Research Articles (RAs) Being Considered for Publication in ‘Center’ Journals: A Comparative Study of Rhetorical Patterns of RAs in Selected Humanities and Hard Science Disciplines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Zifirdaus Adnan v vi Contents Part II Novice Writers and Readers Approaches to Acculturating Novice Writers into Academic Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Ursula Wingate Are They Discussing in the Same Way? Interactional Metadiscourse in Turkish Writers’ Texts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Erdem Akbas Is the Medical Profession in Spain Living the Culture of ‘Google it’?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Isabel Herrando-Rodrigo Part III Conference Participants Communicating Research at International Conferences: A Multimodal Analysis of an Intercultural or a Disciplinary Specific Genre?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Teresa Morell Native and Non-Native Speaker Interpersonal Skills at Conferences: Managing Self-Mentions and Humour. . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Francisco Javier Fernández Polo A Cross-cultural Study of Indirectness and Hedging in the Conference Proposals of English NS and NNS Scholars . . . . . . 179 Hacer Hande Uysal Part IV Non-Research Academic Genres Breaking the Rules and Searching for Standards in E-mail Exchanges Between Academics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Adam Wojtaszek Academic Job Postings as Part of Academic Discourse: A Cross-cultural Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Jolanta Ła˛cka-Badura Introduction Andrzej Łyda and Krystyna Warchał Abstract This volume looks into culture-specific features of academic commu- nication, with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an AdditionalLanguage(henceforthEAL) anddirected atmulticulturalaudiences.It brings together selected papers which emerged as a result of presentations deliv- eredatPRISEAL2,thesecondconferenceonPublishingandPresenting Research Internationally:IssuesforSpeakersofEnglishasanAdditionalLanguage,andthe manydiscussionsthatfollowed.Themainobjectiveofthisconference,heldatthe UniversityofSilesiainSosnowiec/Katowice(Poland)inJune2011,wastolookat theactivitiesoftheinternationalacademicdiscoursecommunityintermsofniches occupiedbyusersofEAL.Inthisvolumewetakethenicheasaframeofreference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices. 1 Academic Niches: Introductory Remarks Thisvolumelooksintoculture-specificfeaturesofacademiccommunication,with a particular focus on communication conducted in English as an Additional Language (henceforth EAL) and directed at multicultural audiences. It brings together selected papers which emerged as a result of presentations delivered at PRISEAL2, the second conference on Publishing and Presenting Research Inter- nationally: Issues for Speakers of English as an Additional Language, and the manydiscussionsthatfollowed.Themainobjectiveofthisconference,heldatthe A.Łyda(&)(cid:2)K.Warchał UniversityofSilesia,Katowice,Poland e-mail:[email protected] K.Warchał e-mail:[email protected] A.ŁydaandK.Warchał(eds.),OccupyingNiches:Interculturality,Cross-culturality 1 andAculturalityinAcademicResearch,SecondLanguageLearningandTeaching, DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1_1,(cid:2)SpringerInternationalPublishingSwitzerland2014 2 A.ŁydaandK.Warchał UniversityofSilesiainSosnowiec/Katowice(Poland)inJune2011,wastolookat theactivitiesoftheinternationalacademicdiscoursecommunityintermsofniches occupiedbyusersofEAL.Inthisvolumewetakethenicheasaframeofreference for discussion of what is culture-bound, culture-sensitive, and culture-free in the academic community and its practices. In his revised and highly influential create-a-research-space model of article introductions,Swales(1990)developedanecologicalmetaphorforsituatingone’s own work in relation tothe body of prior research done in the field. In particular, he recast his former preparing-for-present-research and Introducing-present- research moves (Swales 1981) as establishing a niche and occupying the niche— rhetorical movements which serve to demonstrate the significance of the research problem for a given field of knowledge, to indicate the place the present research claims in this field, and to show ‘‘how this niche in the wider ecosystem will be occupied and defended’’ (Swales 1990: 142). Publishable scholarly attempts becameconstruedintermsofsuccessfulcompetitionforspace,whereanichemust be found and populated by indicating a gap in or adding significantly to the existing knowledge (Hyland 2000; Swales 2004). Since Genre Analysis, niche has become a prominent concept in academic discourse studies, including those aiming at a better understanding of (Anglo- phone)academicrhetoric(Bhatia1993,2001;Samraj2002;Lorés2004;Yangand Allison 2004; Thompson 2009), those striving for increased awareness of cross- culturaldifferencesintheperceptionoftheauthor’sandreader’srolesinacademic contexts (Duszak 1994; Cˇmejrková 1996; Ahmad 1997; Martín-Martín 2003; Adnan 2008), those preoccupied with problems that arise from these differences for international scholarly communication (Dudley-Evans 1995; Golebiowski 1999; Shaw 2003; ElMalik and Nesi 2008; Belcher 2009; Pérez-Llantada 2010), and those concerned with second language pedagogy (Swales and Feak 1994; Aranha2009;CargillandO’Connor2009).Fromthesevariousstrandsofresearch there emerges another sense of niche as a confined space or periphery, where scholarly activities continue but do not always manage to step outside, or if they do, they often appear attenuated, muffled or distorted, meaning either not what theydidinsidetheniche,orreceivednotinthewaynicheaudienceswouldreceive them. Paradoxically, if research in today’s world has grown into an increasingly collaborativeactivity,andmultinationalresearchteamsandprojectsarebecoming the norm rather than exception, writing still remains a solitary process, practiced by individual scholars in their own linguistic, cultural and institutional research spaces.Writingisthusanattempttocommunicatesomethingtothoseoutsidethis niche, to make oneself heard and understood beyond the limits of one’s own immediate environment. From this perspective successful academic communica- tionisanactofcapturingaresearchspaceandleavinganichedelimitedbyone’s language, status, cultural background, educational tradition, and geopolitical situation.Theaimofthisbookistooffersomeinsightintothesemutuallyrelated, interacting academic spaces. Introduction 3 This book continues the long-standing tradition of inquiry into cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues in academic and other professional discourses, well documented by such volumes as Ventola and Mauranen (1996), Aijmer and Stenström (2004), Zhu (2005), Fløttum et al. (2006), Crawford Camiciottoli (2007),Connoretal.(2008),andSuomela-SalmiandDervin(2009).Itisdifferent from its predecessors in explicitly addressing and being centred upon the concept of research niche understood as a space to be captured and populated, as a tem- porary location to move or grow out of in the course of individual professional development from a novice to an expert, and as a space to consciously reach beyond, delimited by one’s linguistic, cultural, educational, and geopolitical background. It is this broader understanding of niche and a perspective on academicdiscourse asan act of moving, orcommunicating, across niches that,in our view, gives the collection a sense of unity and makes it different from other volumes addressing similar problems. Another important point of difference is that the present volume contributes data from a wide range of academic genres, including written and spoken public professional genres, student writing, occluded genres, and non-research institu- tional text types. By bringing together the results of investigations into research articles,conferenceproposals,conferencepresentations,studentgenres,electronic letters and academic job announcements, it may be informative of the ways in whichthesevariousgenresinteractinbroaderacademiccontextsandofthevariety ofrolesmembersoftheacademicdiscoursecommunityassumeatdifferentstages or in different moments of their professional life. In this sense it can provide data ongenresystemsornetworks(Bazerman2004;Swales2004)whichoperateinthe community and which reflect its internal hierarchy, patterns of interaction, and preferred ways of recycling and restructuring information. Moreover, the findings presented in this volume will offer additional insights into the linguistic variation in academic discourse related to the mode (written or spoken), the status of the participants(noviceorexpert),thetypeofinteraction(publicoroccluded),andits general purpose (research-related or research unrelated). It is also an important characteristic of this collection that while maintaining a focus on EAL, it provides data from a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. The contributions explore international scholarly communication against the background of a number of first languages, including French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Indonesian, with some additional insights from Indian and Japanese users of EAL. The disciplines covered include: technical sciences, linguistics, biomedical sciences, and social sciences, to name but a few. Finally, the studies included in this volume represent different approaches (such as mixed methods approach, ethnographic approach, intervention, and multimodal analysis), adopt different methodologies (among others, corpus linguistics, genre analysis, and discourse analysis) and employ different research tools (e.g., audio-video record- ings, questionnaires, and text-analysing software). They demonstrate the effec- tiveness of these methods and instruments in academic discourse studies, their strengths and limitations, and the ways the results they bring can mutually give support to, limit or challenge the findings.
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