{"title":"Analyzing engagement strategies in argument chain: A comparison between high- and low-scoring EFL undergraduate argumentative essays","authors":"Yifan Geng, Gong Chen, Ming Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101428","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101428","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Drawing on Appraisal theory within Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study employs a corpus-based approach to examine how EFL writers of high- and low-scoring argumentative essays use Engagement resources both individually and in combination to construct arguments within the argument chain at the paragraph level. The quantitative analysis reveals that while both groups use Contract Heterogloss more frequently to assert claims and conclusions, low-scoring writers heavily depend on Pronounce, whereas high-scoring writers utilize a diverse range of Contract Heterogloss. The qualitative analysis indicates that high-scoring writers develop and strengthen their assertive claims by presenting solid reasons and credible evidence to engage with potentially dissenting readers. These elements are incorporated into their writing through combinations of Engagement resources, such as Counter + Entertain/Deny/Justify and Endorse/Entertain + Entertain. However, low-scoring writers failed to adequately support their claims by skillfully deploying Engagement resources across different stages of argument, ultimately weakening the persuasiveness of their arguments. Our findings highlight the importance of providing students with instruction on Engagement strategies and their persuasive impact from a dialogic perspective. The identified strategies can therefore serve as pedagogical tools to assist students in constructing effective arguments by adeptly utilizing Engagement resources, facilitating interaction with external viewpoints and readers.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101428"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142097361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comparative genre analysis of AI-generated and scholar-written abstracts for English review articles in international journals","authors":"Xinwan Kong, Chengyu Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101432","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101432","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>There has been growing interest in the performance and efficiency of ChatGPT in generating academic texts. However, little empirical research has been conducted on its performance in producing review article abstracts. This study adopts the genre analysis approach to investigate the rhetorical moves of review article abstracts in hard and soft science disciplines based on two self-compiled corpora, respectively including 160 scholar-written abstracts from four high-impact international journals, and 160 abstracts generated by ChatGPT, with an aim to reveal the similarities and differences between human-written and AI-generated English review article abstracts. The results show significant differences between human-written and ChatGPT-generated abstracts, first in the frequency of three out of the five moves, and then in the sequential order of moves, with each type of abstracts demonstrating a preference for move sequence patterns as well as obligatory and optional elements. The two types of abstracts differ significantly in the frequency of move embedding, but share the same embedding combination patterns. These findings may deepen our understanding of ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations in generating academic texts across different disciplines, help improve the generative AI system, then highlight the complex relationship among the structure of academic abstracts, discipline cultures and genre knowledge.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101432"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142039203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seeking research funding in a peripheral context: A learner corpus genre study of grant proposal summaries","authors":"Maggie Charles , Karin Whiteside","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101431","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101431","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Although the grant proposal is a high-stakes genre for researchers, there are few analyses available for consultation by learners and most studies investigate only a limited number of successful proposals written by experienced academics. This study reports on a genre analysis of a learner corpus of grant proposal summaries (abstracts), written by researchers who operate at the periphery of academia. The proposals were written by exiled Syrian academics and submitted to the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara) grant awarding body for research funding. A corpus of 102 proposal summaries was compiled consisting of 27 successful and 75 unsuccessful summaries, and a genre framework of three moves and ten steps was developed. Successful summaries were contrasted with unsuccessful summaries; this comparison reveals that unsuccessful summaries underuse the move <em>Indicating the value of the research</em>. Specifically, they tend to omit two steps: <em>Importance</em> (of the research) and <em>Research Outcomes</em>. All Cara summaries were also compared with Matzler's (2021) prototype; results show that both successful and unsuccessful summaries underuse the <em>Methods</em> step. These findings provide pointers to the genre functions likely to be most problematic for learners, and have immediate practical applications in pedagogic materials for proposal writing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101431"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158524000997/pdfft?md5=ba6ea28d548795289085b77deb9f8802&pid=1-s2.0-S1475158524000997-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142011882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Non-native English-speaking (NNES) students’ English academic writing experiences in higher education: A meta-ethnographic qualitative synthesis","authors":"Mingyu Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101430","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101430","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This meta-ethnography synthesises 26 qualitative studies published since 2000 to explore factors shaping NNES students' English academic writing experiences in higher education. The findings reveal that students' writing experiences are significantly influenced by their prior educational backgrounds, current learning contexts, self-perceived writing capabilities, and the strategies they employ to navigate various writing challenges, including a lack of preparedness, insufficient institutional support, and inadequate academic and linguistic competence. The findings also indicate that students' adaptive strategies, such as the use of cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social strategies, play a crucial role in mitigating academic writing deficiencies. The findings underscore the need for higher education institutions to implement more responsive and inclusive support systems that address the cognitive, linguistic, and affective dimensions of students' academic writing endeavours. Drawing upon the findings, a conceptual framework is developed, providing a holistic view of factors mediating students' writing experiences and offering theoretical and practical implications for enhancing educational practices and policies to better support these students’ academic endeavours.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101430"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158524000985/pdfft?md5=302f02a7b0500896dd8112e52f948c59&pid=1-s2.0-S1475158524000985-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141997277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preparing learners for digitally mediated academic communication: Digital multimodal practice in students’ knowledge dissemination videos","authors":"Qing Huang , Sichen Xia","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101429","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101429","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The advancement of digital technologies requires English for Academic Purposes (EAP) education to incorporate digital-multimodal approaches in curriculum development to prepare learners for academic communication in this digital era. One such effort is the integration of digital multimodal composition (DMC). While the existing studies have investigated pedagogical practice involving DMC, there is still a lack of a systematic identification of the multi-semiotic communicative patterns in students' DMC performance. Using a systemic functional approach to multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) and social semiotics approach to multimodality, the study aims to explore the patterns and characteristics of student-generated knowledge dissemination videos, a kind of DMC specifically pertaining to disciplinary communication targeting non-specialists. The analysis displays students' discursive patterns in the creation of interpersonal, ideational, and textual meanings. It is found that students excel in creating interpersonal meaning through configuring embodied and filmic modes and using popular visuals. However, their performance in conveying ideational and textual meaning needs improvement. Some students rely on technical language with unclear visuals, while others use a limited range of semiotics. Textual meaning created in the videos shows intermodal and intramodal incoherence. These findings can inform EAP course development and enhance students’ digital multimodal proficiency in academic communication.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101429"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142058014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mian Hu , Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini , Anna Mendoza
{"title":"Only a cog in a machine?: Reappraising institutionalized EAP teacher identities in a transnational context","authors":"Mian Hu , Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini , Anna Mendoza","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101427","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101427","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Language teacher identity (LTI) research, critical approaches to language education, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), have each grown into considerable areas of scholarship. However, not many studies have addressed topics at the intersection of these triple areas. Therefore, adopting a critical perspective on LTI construction within predominant language ideologies, this study aimed to investigate EAP teachers' professional identity formation in response to institutional policies in a Sino-British university in China. As part of a larger project, data bodies were collected through a narrative survey completed by 77 faculty members and semi-structured interviews with 36 of them at this transnational English-medium university. The analysis of narratives and interview transcripts through qualitative coding procedures revealed three major aspects of the participants' institutionalized identities: ‘The EAP teacher’ (comprising three roles: a cog in a machine, a British acculturation agent, and a mock monolingual role model); ‘The safe researcher’ of trendy topics; and ‘The service provider’ seeking promotion. The findings contribute insights into EAP LTI from a critical perspective by documenting how EAP teachers (are obliged to) construct institutionalized identities in relation to language ideologies and educational policies in a transnational higher education context.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101427"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141951264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The influences of international master's students' feedback seeking behaviour on their feedback literacy and feedback contexts: An ecological perspective","authors":"Fangfei Li , Ye Han","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101424","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101424","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Previous research has found that L2 student writers use inquiry and monitoring to elicit feedback, but few studies have investigated the impact of feedback seeking behaviours (FSB) on student feedback literacy and their learning contexts. To address these issues, the current study drew on an ecological perspective to explore two international master's students' self-initiated FSB in the UK academic environment. Qualitative data analysis of interview transcripts revealed that both students proactively sought feedback, albeit from distinct sources (<em>i.e.</em>, peer feedback vs. teacher feedback). As they chose to seek feedback from their preferred sources, they created greater learning opportunities, which in turn enhanced their dispositions to seek and use feedback, capabilities of eliciting, evaluating feedback and judging their own work, and knowledge about feedback and assessment. The process of seeking feedback also enabled them to construct connections with a wider range of feedback interactants, access more artefacts, and therefore cultivate a more supportive feedback ecology with richer affordances. The uncovered incremental but unbalanced development of student feedback literacy facilitated by FSB, as well as the changes of feedback contexts induced by FSB, provides new insights into the close relationship between FSB, student feedback literacy, and feedback ecology.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101424"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shengkai Yin , Jason Fan , Yan Jin , Paul Stapleton
{"title":"Towards a framework of critical thinking for assessing EAP speaking","authors":"Shengkai Yin , Jason Fan , Yan Jin , Paul Stapleton","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101426","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101426","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As one of the fundamental skills of the 21st century, critical thinking (CT) is a topic of considerable interest within the domain of assessing English for academic purposes (EAP). Recent literature on EAP instruction and assessment indicates that EAP has evolved beyond a strict focus on language improvement to encompass discourse competence and broader academic literacy development, with CT playing an important role in academic communication. A fundamental consideration in educational assessment is the construct that defines the knowledge, skills, or abilities to be assessed. However, CT has not received due attention in the research literature on EAP speaking assessment, thus raising a legitimate concern about its underrepresentation in the academic speaking construct. This study draws on Macqueen's (2022) distinction between theoretical, stated, perceived, and operationalized assessment constructs, with an aim to describe the EAP speaking assessment construct by including the concept of CT. By establishing alignment between what the literature indicates (<em>theoretical</em>), what assessment requires (<em>stated</em>), and how people understand assessment (<em>perceived</em>), a CT assessment framework is proposed to reflect how test takers experience it (<em>operationalized</em>). Our study contributes to a more nuanced conceptualization of CT in the context of EAP speaking, with implications for EAP speaking test development.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101426"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158524000948/pdfft?md5=728a87ce36ed5f69f67efd0db1b5c36c&pid=1-s2.0-S1475158524000948-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘I just feel very dispensable’: Exploring the connections between precarity and identity for academic literacy developers","authors":"Michelle Joubert , Sherran Clarence","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101425","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101425","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Precarious employment is a well-established feature in academia, with many lecturers, tutors and professional services staff on forms of fixed-term contract. It is especially a feature of academic development spaces, such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes, and academic staff and student development programmes. Precarity results in high staff turnover and undermines staff credibility and capacity; these issues may impact student success. Further, for lecturers and tutors themselves, there are implications for their professional identity and sense of legitimacy within their role, department, and university. Using data from qualitative surveys and interviews with academic literacy practitioners in South Africa, this article explores how being precariously employed affects agency and the development of a professional practitioner identity for those on fixed-term contracts. Using aspects of Archer's social realist framework to theorise agency, we show how precarity impacts a sense of purpose and professional self within the university in relation to other academics and students.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101425"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158524000936/pdfft?md5=4e184cb36ec140989d22e6946b541c4d&pid=1-s2.0-S1475158524000936-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141772351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Effectiveness of student academic presentations: What do we learn from presentation guidebooks?","authors":"Alla Zareva","doi":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101423","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101423","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This research is based on a survey of recently published presentation guidebooks designed for both general academic readership as well as scientific and technical communities. The primary objectives were 1) to examine how Anglophone academic culture views <em>effectiveness</em> of academic presentations and, respectively, determine the shared core principles which contribute to it; 2) to identify additional explicitly stated aspects of <em>effective</em> presentations, both general and/or area-specific; 3) to get a better sense of the generalizability of the language recommendations in the guidebooks by looking into whether they were derived from large language data sources or were based primarily on the authors’ subjective language observations.</p><p>Overall, the survey revealed that Anglophone academic culture has a consistent view of several core principles on which <em>effective</em> and <em>successful</em> academic presentations should be built. The guidebooks also offered a shared set of additional characteristics, associated with both the preparation and delivery stage of <em>effective</em> presentations. However, the majority of the surveyed guidebooks lacked in the depth and breadth of their treatment of the language use in presentations. The findings of the survey can be beneficial to instructors and novice presenters alike.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47717,"journal":{"name":"Journal of English for Academic Purposes","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101423"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141736698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}