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Hyland, K. (2012). EAP and Discourse analysis. In Gee J. P. & Handford, M. (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. pp 412-423.
English for Academic Purposes and Discourse Analysis
Ken Hyland
Introduction English for Academic Purposes is an activity at the forefront of language research and teaching today, with a distinctive focus on the particular linguistic preferences, discourse features and communicative practices used in specific academic contexts. Driven by the globalization of higher Education and the emergence of English as the international lingua franca of scholarship, the growth of EAP has crucially depended on its ability to accurately identify what these features and practices are so they can be taught to students and relayed to academics seeking to publish in English. In this enterprise discourse analysis, particularly text-based forms of genre analysis, has become established as perhaps the most widely used and productive methodology. It has helped describe texts within textual and social contexts and provided insights into the ways that rhetorical choices are related to social and epistemological practices in the disciplines. This chapter will offer an overview of the importance of discourse analysis in this area of research and pedagogy, outline something of my own contribution to the area, and make some predictions about future research directions. What is EAP? EAP is usually defined as teaching English with the aim of assisting learners’ study or research in that language (e.g. Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001). In this sense it is a broad term covering all areas of academic communicative practice such as pre-tertiary, undergraduate and post-graduate teaching, classroom interactions, academic publishing, and curriculum issues, as well as research, student and instructional genres (e.g. Hyland, 2009a). The emergence of EAP in the 1980s as a response to growing numbers of L2 students beginning to appear in university courses and in a framework informed by English for Specific Purposes, originally produced an agenda concerned with curriculum and instruction rather than with theory and analysis. EAP was largely a materials and teaching-led
movement focusing on texts and on the search for generic study skills which could be integrated into language courses to make students more efficient learners. Since then, a developing research base in EAP has emphasised the rich diversity of texts, contexts and practices in which students must now operate. While it continues to be heavily involved in syllabus design, needs analysis and materials development, EAP has moved away from purely pedagogic considerations to become a much more theoretically grounded and research informed enterprise. The communicative demands of the modern university involve far more than simply controlling linguistic error or polishing style. In fact, international research, experience, and practice provide evidence for the heightened, complex, and highly diversified nature of such demands. Supported by an expanding range of publications and research journals, there is a growing awareness that students, including native English speakers, have to take on new roles and engage with knowledge in new ways when they enter university. They find that they need to write and read unfamiliar genres and participate in novel speech events, and that communication practices are not uniform across academic disciplines but reflect different ways of constructing knowledge and engaging in teaching and learning. The role of EAP has therefore changed in response to changing conditions in the academy. The huge expansion of university places in many countries, together with an increase in full fee paying international students to compensate for cuts in government support, has resulted in a more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse student population than ever before. Moreover, with the rapid rise in refugee populations around the world, and a consequent increase in international migration, it is common for teachers find non-native users of English in their high school classrooms for whom the concept of ‘academic language’ in any language is an unfamiliar one. In other words, students bring different identities, understandings and habits of meaning-making to their learning which means that teachers can no longer assume that students’ previous learning experiences will provide appropriate schemata and skills to meet the demands of their subject courses. In addition, students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects. In addition to traditional single-subject or joint-honours degrees we now find complex modular degrees
cognitive and linguistic demands of academic target situations and informed by an understanding of texts and the constraints of academic contexts. Discourse analysis is a key resource in this research agenda and has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of academic communication. What has discourse analysis told us about EAP? Discourse analysis is a collection of methods for studying language in action, looking at texts in relation to the social contexts in which they are used. Because language is an irreducible part of social life, connected to almost everything we do, this broad definition has been interpreted in various ways across the social sciences. In EAP it has tended to be a methodology which gives greater emphasis to concrete texts than to institutional social practices, and has largely taken the form of focusing on particular academic genres such as the research article, conference presentation, and student essay. Genre analysis can be seen as a more specific form of discourse analysis which focuses on any element of recurrent language use, including grammar and lexis, which is relevant to the analyst’s interests. As a result, genre analysis sees texts as representative of wider rhetorical practices and so has the potential to offer descriptions and explanations of both texts and the communities that use them. Genres are the recurrent uses of more-or-less conventionalized forms through which individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done using language. Genres can thus be seen as a kind of tacit contract between writers and readers, which influence the behaviour of text producers and the expectations of receivers. By focusing on mapping typicality, genre analysis thus seeks to show what is usual in collections of texts and so helps to reveal underlying Discourses (Gee,
- and the preferences of disciplinary communities. These approaches are influenced by Halliday’s (1994) view of language as a system of choices which link texts to particular contexts through patterns of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features (Christie & Martin, 1997) and by Swales’ (1990) observation that these recurrent choices are closely related to the work of particular discourse communities whose members share broad social purposes.
A range of spoken and written academic genres have been studied in recent years. These include student dissertations (Bunton, 2002; Hyland, 2004c), research articles (Lewin, et al., 2001), scientific letters (Hyland, 2004a), book reviews (Hyland & Diani, 2009), conference presentations (Carter- Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2001), and PhD defences (Swales, 2004) as well as various ‘occluded’, or hidden, genres such as the MBA ‘thought essay’ (Loudermilk, 2007), grant proposals (Connor & Upton, 2004), and editors’ responses to journal submissions (Flowerdew & Dudley-Evans, 2002). This research demonstrates the distinctive differences in the genres of the academy where particular purposes and audiences lead writers to employ very different rhetorical choices (e.g. Hyland, 2004a). Table 1, for example, compares frequencies for different features in a corpus of 240 research articles and 56 textbooks.
Table 1: Selected features i n Research articles and textbooks
per 1,000 words Hedges Self-mention Citation Transitions Research Articles 15.1 3.9 6.9 12. University Textbooks 8.1 1.6 1.7 24. We can see considerable variation in these features across the two genres. The greater use of hedging underlines the need for caution and opening up arguments in the research papers compared with the authorized certainties of the textbook, while the removal of citation in textbooks shows how statements are presented as facts rather than claims grounded in the literature. The greater use of self- mention in articles points to the personal stake that writers invest in their arguments and their desire to gain credit for claims. The higher frequency of transitions, which are conjunctions and other linking signals (such as therefore, but, in addition, etc), in the textbooks is a result of the fact that writers need to make connections far more explicit for readers with less topic knowledge. Perhaps the most productive application of discourse analysis in EAP has been to explore the lexico- grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres to identify their recognisable structural identity. Analysing this kind of patterning has yielded useful information about the ways texts are constructed and the rhetorical contexts in which such patterns are used, as well as providing valuable input for genre-based teaching. Some of this research has followed the move analysis work pioneered
accomplished through the ways ideas are presented, but also by the construction of an appropriate authorial self and the negotiation of participant relationships. Academic discourse analysis research has also pointed to cultural specificity in rhetorical preferences (e.g. Connor, 2002). Although a controversial term, one influential version of culture regards it as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world. Culture is seen as inextricably bound up with language (Kramsch, 1993), so that cultural factors have the potential to influence perception, language, learning, and communication. Although it is far from conclusive, discourse analytic research suggests that the schemata of L2 and L1 writers differ in their preferred ways of organising ideas which can influence academic writing (e.g. Hinkel, 2002). These conclusions have been supported by a range of studies over the past decade comparing the features of research articles in various countries (e.g. Duszak, 1997), student essays (Kubota, 1998), and conference abstracts (Yakhontova, 2002). Much of this contrastive rhetoric research assumes a ‘received view of culture’ which unproblematically identifies cultures with national entities and emphasises predictable consensuality within cultures and differences across them (e.g. Atkinson, 2004). However, it is fair to say that, compared with many languages, academic writing in English tends to: be more explicit about its structure and purposes with constant previewing and reviewing of material employ more, and more recent, citations be less tolerant of digressions be more cautious in making claims, with considerable use of mitigation and hedging use more sentence connectors to show explicitly how parts of the text link together. While we can’t simply predict the ways people are likely to write on the basis of assumed cultural traits, discourse studies have shown that students’ first language and prior learning come to influence ways of organising ideas and structuring arguments when writing in English at university.
Research into academic discourse has not been entirely focused on the printed page, however. As Fairclough (2003: 3), among other, observes: ‘text analysis is an essential part of discourse analysis, but discourse analysis is not merely the linguistic analysis of texts’. A number of studies have sought to show how academic discourses are firmly embedded in the cultures and activities in which their users participate. One example is Prior’s (1998) study of the processes of graduate student writing at a US university. This draws on transcripts of seminar discussions, student texts, observations of institutional contexts, tutor feedback and interviews with students and tutors to give an in-depth account of the ways students negotiate their writing tasks and so became socialized into their disciplinary communities. Swales (1998), on the other hand, offers a ‘thick’ description of the literate cultures of academics themselves. Combining text analyses with extensive observations and interviews, he provides a richly detailed picture of the professional lives, commitments and projects of individuals in three diverse academic cultures: a computer centre, Herbarium and university English Language Centre. Finally, studies conducted from a Critical perspective have focused on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in disciplines, schools and classrooms. Distinguished by an overtly political agenda from other kinds of discourse analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has attempted to show that the discourses of the academy are not transparent or impartial means for describing the world but work to construct, regulate and control knowledge, social relations and institutions. Particular literacy practices possess authority because they represent the currently dominant ideological ways of depicting relationships and realities and these authorised ways of seeing the world exercise control of academics and students alike. Studies by Ivanic (1998) and Lillis (2001) show how this can create tensions for students in coping with university literacy demands, while Flowerdew’s (1999) research suggests similar concerns among Non-Native English scholars.
such as acknowledgements (2004b ), and journal descriptions (Hyland & Tse, 2009) function to engage readers and convey the writer’s position. In addition to studying individual features, I have attempted to offer a framework, or rather, two frameworks, for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. This has consolidated much of my earlier work and collected together a range of features under the headings of stance and engagement (Hyland, 2005a) and metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005b; Hyland & Tse, 2004). The first of these attempts to capture how discoursal choices help construct both writers and readers. Stance is an attitudinal dimension which includes features which refer to the ways writers present themselves and convey their judgements, opinions, and commitments, either intruding to stamp their personal authority onto their arguments or stepping back to disguise their involvement. Engagement (Hyland, 2001a), in contrast, is an alignment dimension where writers acknowledge and connect to others, recognising the presence of their readers, pulling them along with their argument, focusing their attention, acknowledging their uncertainties, including them as discourse participants. Metadiscourse , on the other hand, seeks to offer a more comprehensive and integrated way of examining interaction in academic argument, broadening the scope of interactional resources to also include features such as conjunctions, framing devices, and glosses on content. While these are often considered as simply helping to tie texts together, they have an important role in relating a text to a community. Interaction in academic writing thus involves ‘positioning’, or adopting a point of view in relation to both the issues discussed in the text and to others who hold points of view on those issues. In claiming a right to be heard, and to have their work taken seriously, writers must display a competence as disciplinary insiders. This writer-reader dialogue therefore occurs in a disciplinary context, and my attempts to map the rhetorical preferences which help identify these communities is the second main area of my work. Essentially, we can see disciplines as language using communities which provide the context within which students learn to communicate and to interpret each other’s talk, gradually acquiring the
specialized discourse competencies to participate as group members. Texts are influenced by writers’ memberships of disciplinary groups which have objectified in language certain ways of experiencing and talking about phenomena. Assumptions about what can be known, how it can be known, and how certainly it can be known all help shape discourse practices so that what counts as convincing argument, appropriate tone, persuasive interaction, and so on, is managed for a particular audience (Hyland, 2004a). This emphasis on what is ‘shared’ by a community has led to criticisms that the concept is too structuralist, static, and deterministic (e.g. Prior 1998). But like any community, disciplines are composed of individuals with diverse experiences, expertise and commitments so that actions and understandings are influenced by the personal and biographical as well as by the institutional and sociocultural. Successful academic writing, however, depends on the individual writer’s control of the epistemic conventions of a discipline, what counts as appropriate evidence and argument, and my research has contributed to the growing body of work now devoted to elaborating the considerable differences in these conventions across disciplines. This has explored both student and professional academic genres and discovered rhetorical variation in, for example, the extent of self mention (Hyland, 2001a), citation practices and reporting verbs (Hyland, 2004a), hedges and boosters (Hyland, 1998), sub-technical lexis (Hyland and Tse, 2007), metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005b) and lexical bundles (Hyland, 2008). One of the most striking differences in how language differs across fields is the use of hedges. These function to withhold complete commitment to a proposition, implying that a claim is based on plausible reasoning rather than certain knowledge. They indicate the degree of confidence the writer thinks it might be wise to give a claim while opening a discursive space for readers to dispute interpretations (Hyland, 1996). Because they represent the writer’s direct involvement in a text, something that scientists generally try to avoid, they are twice as common in humanities and social science papers than in hard sciences. One reason for this is there is less control of variables, more diversity of research outcomes, and fewer clear bases for accepting claims than in the sciences. Writers can’t report research with the same confidence of shared assumptions so papers rely far more
One example of this is a study of self-mention , which concerns how far writers want to intrude into their texts though use of ‘ I’ or ‘we ’, or to use impersonal forms. The use of self-mention is a rather vexed issue in academic writing and remains a perennial problem for students, teachers, and experienced writers alike, and the extent to which one can reasonably assert one’s personal involvement, remains highly controversial. While claims have to be warranted by appropriate support and reference to existing knowledge by fitting novelty into a community consensus, success in gaining acceptance for innovation also involves demonstrating an individual contribution to that community and establishing a claim for recognition for academic priority. To some extent this is a personal preference determined by seniority, experience, personality, and so on (Hyland, 2010), but the study illustrated here shows that the presence or absence of explicit author reference is a conscious choice by writers to adopt a particular community-situated authorial identity (Hyland, 2001b). This study employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches, comprising frequency counts and text analysis of a corpus of published articles and a series of interviews with academics from the same fields. The text corpus of 240 research articles consisted of three papers from each of ten leading journals in eight disciplines selected to represent a broad cross-section of academic practice in the fields of engineering, physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. The texts were scanned to produce an electronic corpus of 1.5 million words and searched for expressions of self-mention using WordPilot, a text analysis programme. The search items were the first person pronouns I, me, my, we, us, and our , cases of self-citation and references to work conducted elsewhere by the same authors, and examples of self-mention terms such as this writer or the research team. The most immediately striking features of the text analysis was the saliency of self-mention in the articles and the variety of its disciplinary and formal expression. While research articles may well be characterised by abstraction and high informational production (Biber, 2006), human agents are integral to their meaning. There are sufficient cases of author-reference to suggest that writers have conspicuous promotional and interactional purposes, with every article containing at least one first person reference. Overall, there were roughly 28 expressions of self-mention in each paper, 81% of
these were pronouns and 16% self-citations. There were considerable differences between the disciplines (Table 2), with an average of 44 cases per article in marketing, and only 7 in mechanical engineering. Table 2: Average frequency of self-mention per paper Discipline Totals Self-Citations Pronouns Other Biology 26 .9 10 .8 15 .5 0. Physics 21 .0 2 .8 17 .7 0. Electronic Eng 15 .9 3 .8 11 .6 0. Mechanical Eng 6 .8 3 .7 2 .6 0. Average Hard Fields 17 .6 5 .3 11 .9 0. Marketing 43 .9 4 .9 38 .2 1. Philosophy 36 .7 2 .2 34 .5 0. App Ling 36 .5 3 .2 32 .3 1. Sociology 35 .3 5 .1 29 .4 0. Average Soft fields 38 .1 3 .9 33 .6 0. Overall 27 .8 4 .6 22 .7 0. Perhaps the most obvious form of self-mention is to refer to one’s earlier research, but the extent of self-citation in these papers was surprising, with about 70% of the papers in the study containing a reference to the author. It was particularly frequent in biology, with an average of 11 citations per paper and was particularly prominent in the sciences and engineering where it made up almost 11% of all references, compared with only 5% in the soft fields. These broad variations indicate underlying differences in the research practices of these communities which I noted above. References in sciences and engineering tend to be tightly bound to a particular research topic and contribute to a sense of linear progression in these areas. Because of the heavy financial investment in technical equipment on which scientific research often depends and the sheer volume of knowledge generated, scientists tend to participate in highly discrete and specialised areas of research from where they can follow defined paths and make precise contributions. Research on particular issues is therefore often conducted at a restricted number of sites and by a limited number of researchers, allowing writers to draw on their own work to a greater extent than in the soft knowledge fields.
differences suggest that self mention varies with different assumptions about the effects of authorial presence and rhetorical intrusion in different knowledge-making communities. These are issues worth addressing and exploring further with students, for only by developing a rhetorical consciousness of these kinds of features can they gain control over their writing in academic contexts. Looking to the future Predictions are always difficult to make, but it is clear that the influential role of discourse analysis in assisting teachers to prepare students for their language-related experiences is unlikely to diminish any time soon. The findings of discourse analytic studies have replaced intuitions about academic writing based on impressions of scientific discourse, revealing that texts are highly persuasive and interactive and that writers in different disciplines represent themselves, their work and their readers in very different ways. There are however, a number of areas where research is likely to make an increasing impact on EAP. The first is in the area of clarifying the interdisciplinary complexities of the modern academy. Many student genres, such as counselling case notes, reflexive journals and clinical reports, remain to be described while analyses of more occluded research process genres would greatly assist novice writers in the publication process. We also know little about the ways that genres form ‘constellations’ with neighbouring genres (Swales, 2004) nor about the ‘genre sets’ that a particular individual or group engages in, or how spoken and written texts cluster together in a given social activity. In addition, and as I have mentioned earlier, the mix of academic subjects now offered to students impact on the genres they have to participate in, compounding the challenges of writing in the disciplines with novel literacy practices that have barely been described. Discourse analyses have much to contribute in all of these areas. Second, it is also clear that much remains to be learnt and considerable research undertaken before we are able to identify more precisely the notion of ‘community’ and how it relates to discipline and the discoursal conventions that it routinely employs. Nor is it yet understood how our memberships of
different groups influence our participation in academic discourses. For now, the term discipline might be seen as a shorthand form for the various identities, roles, positions, relationships, reputations, reward systems and other dimensions of social practices constructed and expressed through language in the academy, but these concepts need to be refined through the analyses of academic texts and contexts. A third broad area is that of understanding the increasing role of multimodal and electronic texts in academics contexts. Academic texts, particularly in the sciences, have always been multimodal, but textbooks and articles are now far more heavily influenced by graphic design than ever before and the growing challenge to the page by the screen as the dominant medium of communication means that images are ever more important in meaning-making. Analytical tools developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) and others, for example, provide a starting point for researchers and teachers to explain how visuals have been organised for maximum effect, while considerably more work needs to be done to understand the role of multimedia and hypertext in EAP classrooms.
Conclusions
EAP, while a practically-oriented activity committed to demystifying prestigious forms of discourse, unlocking students’ creative and expressive abilities, and facilitating their access to greater life chances, is grounded in the descriptions of texts and practices. By providing teachers with a way of understanding how writing is shaped by individuals making language choices in social contexts, it contributes to both theory and practice. In particular, it shows how EAP has nothing to do with topping up generic language skills, but involves developing new kinds of literacy: equipping students with the communicative skills to participate in particular academic cultures. While these ideas have been around for some time, it is only through discourse analysis that we have been able to specify more clearly what this actually means. Further Reading
Crookes, G. (1986). Towards a validated analysis of scientific text structure. Applied Linguistics, 7, 57-70. Duszak, A. (1997a) “Analyzing digressiveness in Polish academic texts” In A. Duszak (Ed) Culture and styles of academic discourse. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 323-41. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing Discourse. London: Routledge. Flowerdew, J. (1999). ‘Problems of writing for scholarly publication in English: the case of Hong Kong’. Journal of Second Language Writing , 8(3), 243-64. Flowerdew, J. and Dudley-Evans, T. (2002). ‘Genre analysis of editorial letters to international journal contributors’. Applied Linguistics, 23, 463-89. Gee, J. (1999). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Gimenez, J. (2009). Beyond the academic essay: Discipline-specific writing in nursing and midwifery. Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 7 (3): 151-164. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd Ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Hinkel, E. (2002). Second Language Writers’ Text. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hyland, K. (1996). Writing without conviction? Hedging in scientific research articles. Applied Linguistics 17 (4): 433-454. Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hyland, K. (2001a). Bringing in the reader: addressee features in academic articles. Written Communication. 18 (4): 549-574.Hyland, 2001b Hyland, K. (2001a). ‘Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles’. English for Specific Purposes , 20(3), 207-26. Hyland, K. (2002a). Authority and invisibility: authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics. 34 (8): 1091- Hyland, K. (2002b). ‘What do they mean? Questions in academic writing’. TEXT , 22, 529-57. Hyland, K. (2002c). ‘Directives: argument and engagement in academic writing’. Applied Linguistics, 23(2), 215-39. Hyland, K. (2004a) Disciplinary Discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hyland, K. (2004b). ‘Graduates’ gratitude: the generic structure of dissertation acknowledgements’. English for Specific Purposes, 23(3), 303-24. Hyland, K. (2004c). ‘Disciplinary interactions: metadiscourse in L2 postgraduate writing’. Journal of Second Language Writing , 13, 133-51. Hyland, K. (2005a). ‘Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse’. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 173-91. Hyland, K. (2005b). Metadiscourse. London, Continuum. Hyland, K. (2008). ‘As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation’. English for Specific Purposes , 27(1), 4-21. Hyland, K. (2009a). Academic discourse. London: Continuum Hyland, K. (2009b). Corpus informed discourse analysis: the case of academic engagement. In M. Charles, S. Hunston & D. Pecorari (Eds.) At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse: Analysing Academic Discourses. London: Continuum. Hyland, K. (2010). Community and individuality: performing identity in Applied Linguistics. Written Communication. Hyland, K. (2010). Community and individuality: performing identity in Applied Linguistics_. Written Communication_. Hyland, K. and Tse, P. (2004). ‘Metadiscourse in academic writing: a reappraisal’. Applied Linguistics, 25(2), 156-77. Hyland, K. & Tse, P. (2005). Evaluative that constructions: signalling stance in research abstracts. Functions of Language. 12 (1): 39- Hyland, K. and Tse, P. (2007). ‘Is there an “academic Vocabulary”?’ TESOL Quarterly ,41(2), 235-54. Hyland, K. & Tse, P. (2009) “The leading journal in its field”: Evaluation in journal descriptions. Discourse Studies. Hyland, K. & Diani, G. (Eds). (2009). Academic evaluation: review genres in university settings. London: Palgrave-MacMillan. Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
