Differences in engagement : A comparison of the strategies used by British and Chinese research article writers
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 23237032
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1016/j.jeap.2019.02.003
- Title of journal
- Journal of English for Academic Purposes
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 121
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- -
- ISSN
- 1475-1585
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This article reports on applied, empirical corpus linguistic research to inform the design of education and training in academic writing. The research examines and compares the way research articles written in English by Chinese and British authors position their claims in relation to the prior literature and reader assumptions, and the alternative ways claims can be positioned and organised to achieve the authors’ communicative intentions.
A new methodological approach extends procedures described in the Systemic Functional Linguistics literature. Thirty research articles published in international journals in the same field (of equivalent impact factor), were analysed in terms of the Engagement system within Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005). The Engagement framework is extended by exploring the interactive effects of different combinations of engagement items. Of the articles analysed, half were by authors educated and working in the UK, while the other half were by Chinese authors educated and working in Mainland China or Taiwan. The UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell, 2011) was employed and texts analysed independently by the authors. The significant differences in the use of Engagement resources by Chinese and British authors were identified and explored.
By exploring the interactive effects of different combinations of engagement items, the research advances the work of Lancaster (2014), and is thought to be the first to undertake detailed analysis of this phenomenon. The findings inform the design of teaching of research writing, and the training of international journal editors and reviewers. The research has been presented by both authors at the Corpus Linguistics Conference (2017). The article is included in a recent meta-analysis of research on authorial evaluation in English academic writing (Xie 2020).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -