Hunting for GAD: the search for a description of

General Academic Discourse

Dr Esther Daborn, University of Glasgow,

1 Introduction

This paper presented findings from work in progress on a corpus of published papers collected from Glasgow academics.The background to the project is that we want to compile a "phrase book" of useful "academic" language and generate materials for students learning to write in the Western academic tradition. The question is "What goes into it?" Logically, we model the written norms of the discourse community that the students are aiming to join.

We have collected 110 papers which give us 674,129 words. Since a text is essentially goal oriented and interpretable in sociological terms, we can assume that academic discourse is a social construct, and that membership of that community of discourse comes about by strategic manipulation of rhetorical and linguistic elements available in the repertoire. So to help students move from being novices to experts, we need something we can call "general academic discourse" as a starting point. Thus the question for this presentation is "Does this community of discourse have features that we can call "general academic discourse" or GAD?

2 GAD

To resolve the general / specific distinction, my starting point is to look at the notion of variation. We know that that in corpus analysis we find syntactic variation. We know there are important systematic differences across registers at all linguistic levels (Biber et al 1994). Also, we find functional variation across disciplines, and within a discipline depending on the role of a particular linguistic element for a different textual purpose (Ferguson 2001, Charles 2000). And, as I suggest in this paper, we can find variation according to level of linguistic skill and academic expertise. This is the distinction that I think is useful to our students: the one between "novice" and "expert".

To clarify this distinction I refer to a recent paper in which Swales and colleagues report that they interviewed academics about their writing practices (Swales et al 1998). The academics said that they learned to write in a particular discipline during graduate study. Importantly they said: "When you are starting out as an academic writer, you do it by imitating other papers, but as you get older, you have your own style" (ibid: 113).

This means that we are basically teaching our students (novices) to look at what academics (experts) "do" with language when they are "doing discourse". We are "fishing" for the most accessible linguistic items that academics use to perform particular functions in the rhetorical context of the discourse, and teaching the students to do the same. We are generalising with linguistic elements of the coarsest, roughest kind within the overall range of the linguistic repertoire. They are starting points from which the student can proceed. The student then needs to look for the particular distinguishing marks of style within their own discipline. To continue the fishing analogy, they are looking for the fish with particular kinds of spots. They are then in the process of joining the academic community and refining their own style as they develop linguistic skill and academic confidence.

So, in the search for GAD, frequency of occurrence and relevance to novices are important criteria. And, as with any pedagogic tool, we are looking for the academic language that we can realistically expect students to learn and use.

3 Analysis

For this particular search we decided to look at "it is" because it is interesting linguistically and useful pedagogically. The "it is" structure can be used to carry information, show writer attitude, or signal writer intentions in the text. For overseas learners of many linguistic backgrounds it presents difficulties, especially when used as a non-referential subject.

We grouped our corpus into Technical, Medical and Social Science and found 1053 occurrences in the 674,129 words. To analyse the functions the language items were performing we took the Hallidayan notions "ideational", "textual", and "interpersonal" and simplified them to suit our purposes. Thus, any instances of "it is" which gave information about the propositional content (ideational) were classified as "informational". Any instances providing information about the text itself were classified as "textual". Any instances where the writer shows their view (interpersonal) were classified as "evaluative". This last group is the most interesting in the current hunt for language to assist the novice as it can help the writer with thorny problem of academic persona. (For a more rigorous consideration of this aspect of the use of "it" see Charles 2000.)

For each functional category we found examples ranging from novice to expert usage. There they are summarised below by showing one “novice” and one “expert” example for each category. The sequence of functional categories is informational, then textual, and finally evaluative.

4 Findings

4.1 The Informational Category

The informational category is the largest, and the one we have done least work on in terms of rhetorical function. At this stage it is only possible to comment on syntactic structures relevant to GAD. The range from the “novice” to “expert” extends from "it is" + adjective, noun, verb tenses, adverbs and prepositional phrases to "it cleft" and "it is" + "that" clause.

4.2 The Textual Category

The textual category includes items which refer to the text itself.

4.3 The Evaluative Category

The evaluative category is the most interesting and challenging because of the extent to which interpretation of writer's purpose is required. We subdivided the examples into 3 categories: truth-value to the academic community, truth-value to the writer, and writer's attitudinal stance.

4.3.1 Truth-value to the academic community is an ambiguous attribution of stance. It refers to how much something is believed or accepted as appropriate to the community of scholars. It seems that the ambiguity may sometimes be deliberate. In that case of "it is assumed" we ask "by whom?" (For more detailed comments see Thompson & Yiyun, 1991).

This emphasises the fact that membership of the discourse community comes about by strategic manipulation of rhetorical and interactive elements. Scholarly writers have to play two roles simultaneously as: a) "humble servants of the discipline" (Myers 1989: 72, cited in Swales et al 1998) and as b) "the irreverent pioneers breaking new grounds and arguing for originality of claims and rightness of findings" (Jacoby 1987:34, cited in Swales et al 1998).

4.3.2 Truth-value to the writer shows epistemic stance. There is implicit attribution of stance to the writer. This category is subdivided into 3 groups

a) Clear - how much something is evident or certain.

b) Important - lexis ranges from important to worthwhile and notable.

c) Probable - how much something is possible, likely, or probable

4.3.3 Writer's attitudinal stance shows what it is realistic or acceptable, or fair to say. It is the nearest the writer comes to saying whether something is right or wrong, good or bad.

5 Conclusion

The detailed findings show a good range of linguistic sophistication and academic confidence from “novice” to “expert”. It is suggested that these “novice” examples are the candidates for GAD, and will help students to get started. The paper closes with a summary table which can give further help. It indicates the frequencies with which “it is” is used for a particular function across disciplines. The frequencies show points of difference in writing purpose between subject areas which can guide students. This is an area for further investigation.

References

Biber, D, Conrad, S, Reppen, R, 1994, "Corpus-based Approaches to Issues in Applied Linguistics", Applied Linguistics 15 (2) 169 - 189.

Biber, Douglas, Johansson, S, Leech, G, Conrad, S, Finegan, E (eds) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, 1999. London: Pearson Education Ltd.

Charles, Maggie, 2000, "The role of an introductory "it" pattern in constructing an appropriate academic persona". In Patterns and Perspectives: Insights into EAP Writing Practice, Paul Thompson (ed), Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Reading. 46-60

Coxhead, Averil, 1998 "An Academic Word List", English Language Institute Occasional Publication Number 18, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Ferguson, Gibson "If you pop over there: a corpus based study of conditionals in medical discourse"ESP20 (2001) 61-82

Francis, G and Sinclair, J, 1994 ""I bet he drinks Carling Black Label": a riposte to Owen on Corpus Grammar", Applied Linguistics 15 (2) 189 - 200.

Owen, Charles, 1993, "Corpus-Based Grammar and the Heineken Effect: Lexico-grammatical Description for Language Learners", Applied Linguistics 14 (2) 167-187

Stainton, Caroline (1996) "Metadiscourse: the rhetorical Plane of Text", Nottingham Working Papers No 2, University of Nottingham.

Swales, J M, Ahmad, U K, Chang, Y Y, Chavez, D, Dressen, D F, & Seymour, R, 1998, "Consider this: the Role of imperatives in Scholarly Writing", Applied Linguistics 19 (1) 97-121

Thompson, G and Ye Yiyun, 1991, "Evaluation in the Reporting Verbs Used in Academic Papers",Applied Linguistics 12 (4) 365 - 382.

Thurston, J and Candlin, C N, 1998 "Concordancing and the teaching of Academic English,ESP 17 (3) 267-280

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