This book addresses an important aspect of how language is used in written communication: the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. This ...is known as METADISCOURSE. Metadiscourse is a key resource in language, as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways. Writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. This helps the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Metadiscourse is therefore crucial to successful communication. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis. Learning how to use metadiscourse in writing is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book has four main purposes: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic. - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers.
The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently ...in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term
proximity to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features which display both authority as an expert and a personal position towards issues in an unfolding text. Examining a corpus of texts in two very different genres, research papers and popular science articles, I attempt to highlight some of the ways writers manage their display of expertise and interactions with readers through rhetorical choices which textually construct both the writer and the reader as people with similar understandings and goals.
A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's ...projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers.
Metadiscourse Hyland, Ken
2018, 2019/01/01, 2018-10-18
eBook
First released in 2005, Ken Hyland's Metadiscourse has become a canonical account of how language is used in written communication. 'Metadiscourse' is defined as the ways that writers reflect on ...their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. It is a key resource in language as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways and as such it is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book achieves for main goals: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers The book shows how writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. It shows how these tools help the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis and this book makes this a central goal
Writing in the academy has assumed huge importance in recent years as countless students and academics around the world must now gain fluency in the conventions of academic writing in English to ...understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning. Professor Ken J. Hyland has been a contributor to the literature on this topic for over 20 years, with 26 books and over 200 chapters and articles. This work has had considerable influence in shaping the direction of the field and generating papers and PhD theses from researchers around the world. This is a topic which has found its time, as a central concept in applied linguistics, sociology of science, library studies, bibliometrics, and so on. This book brings together Ken Hyland's most influential and cited papers. These are organised thematically to provide both an introduction to the study of academic discourse and an overview of his contribution to the understanding of how academics construct themselves, their disciplines and knowledge through written texts. Several academic celebrities from the field provide a brief commentary on the papers and the book includes an overall reflection by the author on the impact of the papers and the direction of the field together with linear notes on the specific papers in each section. The volume not only includes some of Hyland's best chapters and journal articles but the thoughts of disciplinary luminaries on both the ideas in the book and the general state and direction of the field.
•Dominance of English in academic publishing raises issues of ‘linguistic injustice’.•Mixed evidence from studies of author perceptions, texts and editorial decisions.•Assumptions of Native speaker ...advantage and primacy of language unfounded.•Situatedness and isolation key factors in publishing success.•Geographical location, publishing experience and collaborators have more impact.
Academic publication now dominates the lives of academics across the globe who must increasingly submit their research for publication in high profile English language journals to move up the career ladder. The dominance of English in academic publishing, however, has raised questions of communicative inequality and the possible ‘linguistic injustice’ against an author's mother tongue. Native English speakers are thought to have an advantage as they acquire the language naturalistically while second language users must invest more time, effort and money into formally learning it and may experience greater difficulties when writing in English. Attitude surveys reveal that English as an Additional Language authors often believe that editors and referees are prejudiced against them for any non-standard language. In this paper, I critically review the evidence for linguistic injustice through a survey of the literature and interviews with scholars working in Hong Kong. I argue that framing publication problems as a crude Native vs non-Native polarization not only draws on an outmoded respect for ‘Native speaker’ competence but serves to demoralizes EAL writers and marginalize the difficulties experienced by novice L1 English academics. The paper, then, is a call for a more inclusive and balanced view of academic publishing.
•I explore how metadiscourse is understood and its strengths and weaknesses.•I propose a conception of metadiscourse along a text-interpersonal continuum.•I examine patterns of publication and impact ...in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.•Main keywords relate to comparisons across languages, genres, disciplines and proficiencies.•Persian, Chinese and Spanish are the languages most frequently analysed.
Metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners – is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, pragmatics and language teaching. This interest has grown up over the past 40 years driven by a dual purpose. The first is a desire to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of use. That is, how individuals use language to orient to and interpret particular communicative situations, and especially how they draw on their understandings of these to make their intended meanings clear to their interlocutors. The second is to employ this knowledge in the service of language and literacy education. But while many researchers and teachers find it to be a conceptually rich and analytically powerful idea, it is not without difficulties of definition, categorisation and analysis. In this paper I explore the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and map its influence and directions through a state of the art analysis of the main online academic databases and current published research.
Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social ...engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this paper, I explore how advanced second language writers deploy these resources in a high stakes research genre. The paper examines the purposes and distributions of metadiscourse in a corpus of 240 doctoral and masters dissertations totalling four million words written by Hong Kong students. The paper proposes a model of metadiscourse as the interpersonal resources required to present propositional material appropriately in different disciplinary and genre contexts. The analysis suggests how academic writers use language to offer a credible representation of themselves and their work in different fields, and thus how metadiscourse can be seen as a means of uncovering something of the rhetorical and social distinctiveness of disciplinary communities.
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