Niall Curry chats to us about contrasting academic writing ahead of his upcoming webinar in our Academic English Online Conference titled Rhetorical Readers in Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Reader Engagement in English, French and Spanish.
The paper centres on the understanding that all acts of writing are culturally bound. That is to say that our cultures, such as our educational cultures vary the way in which we write in different parts of the world (Clyne 1987; Hinds 1987; Fløttum et al. 2006; Salager-Meyer 2011).In fact, researchers such as Salager-Meyer (2011, p. 71) have studied this, to find evidence of the existence of differences in the level of explicitness between languages where, for example, texts written in English reflect a more reader-oriented attitude while texts written in French and Spanish reflect a more writer-oriented attitude. Moreover, Spanish scientific writing is now increasingly being seen as heavily anglicised reflecting elements of writer stance and reader engagement that would be incongruous with traditional academic writing in Spanish (Hyland and Salager-Meyer 2008, p.340).
So what exactly does this mean?
Well, from such an understanding we could infer that if academic writing in English can be seen as reader-oriented and writer-responsible we recognise that it is the duty of the writer to scaffold and support the reader through the text. Conversely, where French is more writer-oriented and reader-responsible, it becomes the duty of the reader to effectively navigate the text. In the case of Spanish then, we imagine it balancing somewhere in between. With this in mind, we can envisage the plethora of challenges that face French and Spanish L1 speakers writing academic English.
We need not leave this to our imaginations however. In fact there has been a recent growth in interest in contrasting academic writing in different languages, due to its role in a world of increasing ‘interlingual and intercultural communication’ and owing to issues surrounding the representation of non-native English speaking academic writers in published works (Pérez-Llantada 2010, p.45). This difficulty that non-native academic writers can have publishing, Bocanegra-Valle (2014, p. 1) argues, is due to a lack of competent knowledge of academic linguistic items. Linguistic items such as evaluative markers are noteworthy here, as Hyland (2005a, p. 152) argues they play an important role in engaging the reader and presenting the writer’s identity and if misused, can lead readers to infer overconfidence, a lack of confidence or directness from writers’ claims.
This idea of how writers engage readers in academic writing becomes increasingly fraught when we recognise that it is not only discipline specific (Hyland 2005b, p. 175) but that it can also vary across languages (Biber and Conrad 2001, p. 192). For these reasons, we can see that understanding how writers engage with readers in different languages can be valuable for learners of academic writing (Shaw 2004, p. 13).
Contrastive analysis of reader engagement
In order to illustrate this, the paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of reader engagement markers in research articles in English and French, taken from the KIAP corpus (Fløttum et al. 2006) and a comparable Spanish subcorpus. Within these data, the markers of reader engagement are categorised according to their function, such as questions used to ‘get attention’ or reader pronouns like ‘we’ used to ‘create membership’. They are then contrasted, analysing them in terms of their morpho-syntactic properties, location and formal typology with a view to measure equivalence across the three languages. What this can show us is:
- whether or not the three languages engage readers to the same degree
- whether or not the three languages engage readers for the same or different reasons
- whether or not the language and text surrounding the engagement markers is subject to different trends in the three languages.
What I have found is evidence of some important differences at the level of function, form, location and morpho-syntax which are investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Such differences allow us to add to the debate on the nature of academic writing in English as compared to other languages. More importantly, we can see evidence of areas of potential interference which could inhibit non-native English speaker academic writers from publishing their work in international contexts; something which is now a prerequisite for academic career success. Some valuable and tangible insights from this research for teachers and learners pertain to
- how English uses more questions and reader pronouns than French and Spanish
- how Spanish seems least reader-oriented
- how reader pronouns differ in frequencies, functions, sentence length, word-class, and distribution in different languages
These kinds of insights have implications for direct and indirect corpus approaches to language teaching (Bernardini 2006) where we can see its value for both classroom exploration and EAP materials development. Directly, following studies such as Lee and Swales (2006) and Braun (2007), students could be engaged to study their own language for engagement markers and contrast them with models of expert academic language.