Volume 4, Issue 9 , December 2012, , Pages 165-176
Abstract
In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded ...
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In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing process, is shown to be susceptible to cultural mentalities. Therefore, in this study an attempt is made to explore interactive and interactional metadiscourse strategies use by the Persian writers in the genre of research articles (RAs). For the purpose of this study, a corpus of 60 Persian research articles from social and natural sciences was selected for a close qualitative manual analysis. It appeared that, though globally similar in many ways, different IMRD sections of RAs which follow different cognitive genre types use interactive and interactional strategies differently. Also, the conventions of the two sciences appeared to be weirdly different. The findings are analyzed and implications are drawn for the teachers and learners of writing research articles in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. It is argued that without such characterizations it would be very difficult to gather an idea of the current rhetorical trend in Persian language so that a comparison can be made with any target language conventions in teaching and learning foreign languages.
As part of a wider attempt to bestow the spirit of scholarly prose upon the research articles’ rhetorical structure, academic writers invariably take advantage of quantity metadiscourse markers to avoid prolixity and live up to the implicit and explicit maxims of quantity category as suggested ...
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As part of a wider attempt to bestow the spirit of scholarly prose upon the research articles’ rhetorical structure, academic writers invariably take advantage of quantity metadiscourse markers to avoid prolixity and live up to the implicit and explicit maxims of quantity category as suggested in Gricean CP and similar models. In order to develop a clear understanding of quantity strategies distribution in academic prose, 120 research articles were selected from among recently published journals in Sciencedirect database. The articles were selected equally from two disciplines in social sciences (SS) including applied linguistics and sociology and two disciplines from natural sciences (NS) including chemistry and medicine. The linguistic realizations of metadiscursive quantity strategies comprised of endophoric markers and collapsers were estimated through a manual analysis of the corpus. The results showed that collapsing is a widespread strategy specifically among NS writers. Differences were found between SS and NS writers in their use of initials, citations and footnotes\endnotes. It is argued that collapsing is an inherent property of NS disciplines giving rise to the dense use of such markers. At the end, the implications of the study to teaching and learning writing research articles are discussed.
Writing projects are socially-situated identities. The rhetorically-loaded aspects of writing, like metadiscourse marking, are more prone to carry such identities. Through analyzing metadiscourse strategies employment in Persian and English (as the lingua franca of academic discourse community) research ...
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Writing projects are socially-situated identities. The rhetorically-loaded aspects of writing, like metadiscourse marking, are more prone to carry such identities. Through analyzing metadiscourse strategies employment in Persian and English (as the lingua franca of academic discourse community) research articles, this study makes an attempt to find out whether Persian native writers take on the identity and norms of the discourse community in writing in their own language or preserve the cultural identity and norms of their native language. A comparison of 36 Persian and 36 English research articles showed that, on the whole, the norms of Persian language in the use of metadiscourse were different from that of the academic discourse community. Closer analysis revealed more similarities in the employment of interactive metadiscourse used to guide the readers, and significant differences in the use of interactional metadiscourse that could represent the specific cultural identity of the Persian writers.
