Reflection on Academic Writing

This paper shared challenges encountered in academic writing from the perspective of a novice researcher and experi⁃ences in attaining skills in developing a research article of proper quality.

For a Systematic Teaching of Research at the University: Some Avenues for Reflection Informed by the Academic Writing Course

Scientific research aims to understand the reality that surrounds us.It is defined by Benoit Gauthier as:“an activity of objective quest for knowledge on factual questions”.By virtue of its goal of objectively advancing knowledge in a particular field,it requires rigor,precision and method.As heuristic practice is not a natural exercise,the skills required in the development of scientific work need to be taught to students who are often helpless in face of these requirements.It is therefore important for the faculty to support and,even more so,to train students in research.The Faculty of French and Francophone Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University(BFSU)propose an Academic Writing course accessible to students of the fourth year of the bachelor program.This article first offers a description of the course in its components,both theoretical and practical.Then,it analyses the weaknesses observed by the professor during his teaching and some reflections are proposed in order to try to develop a more systemic approach to research at university aimed at allowing a greater empowerment of the students coupled with more comprehensive training.

High-frequency Grammatical Errors in Academic Writings by Chinese Students in International School

This research investigates four categories of high-frequency grammatical errors from 45 students’academic writings via script analysis.A group of 36 students responded to a questionnaire focusing on their beliefs regarding these grammatical constructions.The participants are enrolled in an international school in Suzhou City.A total of 646 sentences were analyzed,among which295(45.7%)are inaccurate.Of the 364 errors found,most of them(64.0%)fall into the category of Subject-verb agreement,followed by subordinate clauses(28.6%);errors in English existential construction and the passive voice are a few.Also,the usage rate of subordinate clause is 42.7%,of which a large proportion was incorrect.

On the Use of the Passive and Active Voice in Academic Writings of Meth ods Section

Voice is an important topic in academic writing research.Despite increasing research interest,voice has remained a contentious topic.In the article:On the Use of the Passive and Active Voice in Astrophysics Journal Papers:With Extensions to other Languages and other Fields,an interesting hypothesis has been put forward:“Writers of methods sections in this field tend to use we+active when they have made a unique procedural choice or have introduced some technical innovation.On the other hand,the passive seems to be used when authors are simply following established or standard procedures.”Based on the existing research,this paper chooses to study the active and passive forms in the methods section of research articles,and we examine the frequency of the active and passive verb forms in the methods section of two linguistics journal articles.And to verify an old hypothesis:The we+active is used for new stuff,while the passive is preferred for old stuff,this paper will examine the we+active forms and passive verb forms the in methods section in two linguistic journal articles.

A New Perspective on an Old Subject:Mobile-assisted Language Learning in English Academic Writing in Hong Kong Universities

The goal of this short paper is to bring English academic writing(EAW)and mobile-assisted language learning(MALL)together to examine to what degree the latter can be effectively employed to support the former in the Hong Kong higher education context.It utilizes the perspectives generated from the literature,together with professional interpretation,to illustrate the affordances of MALL in EAW in the community.It is suggested that MALL can be employed to integrate academic English into the students’daily lives,through which they can implicitly build the knowledge of academic register outside of the classroom and ultimately use it in the classroom.

The intertextuality of argumentation:a semiotic approach to academic writing in higher education

The importance of argumentation in academic writing,while historically recognised,has arguably lost prominence alongside the rapid expansion of higher education since the early 1990s in the UK.This has been exacerbated by an increasingly prevalent technological intervention in teaching and learning processes.With this as a background,this article presents a semiotic analysis of student dissertation extracts to illustrate the role of intertextuality in governing interpretative,evaluative,and concluding propositions in argumentation.Each proposition is perceived as indexed to syntactical compositionality by which a previous proposition elicits a present one that awaits a future one,thus forming a line of argument.The analysis teases out what is at stake concerning the interdependence of signifying codes in textual relations and functions.This brings into view a network of sign actions that lends itself to instances of signification in mediating and coordinating propositions in argumentation.The article concludes with reflection on the medium of English as a lingua franca for studies in higher education,highlighting a semiotic understanding of the intertextuality of argumentation in academic writing.

Exploring the Impact of Translanguaging on Chinese-speaking Students’Academic English Writing:Taking CET-4 as an Example

This qualitative research study attempts to discover the real thinking process of learners who are native Chinese speakers in Academic English Writing(AEW)through interviews.Introspecting an EFL learner’s thinking process in English writing is based on two theories:critical period hypothesis and translanguaging.The results of the study indicate that translanguaging has a positive impact on the English CET-4 writing of learners who lack proficiency in English.For those learners who lack proficiency in the second language,translanguaging is an effective auxiliary tool for them to complete AEW.

Teaching Hong Kong English before Teaching Academic English: The Gateway to Effective Learning of College Writing

Owing to the negative view of Hong Kong English(HKE)in popular discourse,few English lecturers in Hong Kong universities directly acknowledge or discuss the variety in a non-linguistic course.This paper illustrates an action research study of how HKE may play a role in an academic writing course of a sub-degree program in Hong Kong.Focusing on 8 representatives from an academic writing course with 100 students,it employed the qualitative experiment method to examine whether students who had possessed basic linguistic knowledge of HKE from an additional tutorial would perceive HKE and academic writing differently from those who had not.Student representatives from each group were invited to a focus group to explore ideas about the two subjects discussed in class.Their conversations suggested that prior knowledge of the syntactic features of HKE might raise students’awareness of the grammatical differences between the variety and the standard.The analysis also suggested that introducing the linguistic view of HKE to students might render them optimistic about their variety,helping them identify the situations where the variety would be tolerant of and settings where Standard English would be expected.The study suggested that such an intervention might facilitate students’learning of Standard English for academic purposes and practices of English in actual professional communication.Upon the improvement or advancement,they will position themselves more powerfully in the dichotomy between the standard and non-standard.More formal research on a similar or relevant topic is required to validate the impact of understanding HKE on learning academic writing.

Teaching Hong Kong English before Teaching Academic English:The Gateway to Effective Learning of College Writing

Owing to the negative view of Hong Kong English(HKE)in popular discourse,few English lecturers in Hong Kong universities directly acknowledge or discuss the variety in a non-linguistic course.This paper illustrates an action research study of how HKE may play a role in an academic writing course of a sub-degree program in Hong Kong.Focusing on 8 representatives from an academic writing course with 100 students,it employed the qualitative experiment method to examine whether students who had possessed basic linguistic knowledge of HKE from an additional tutorial would perceive HKE and academic writing differently from those who had not.Student representatives from each group were invited to a focus group to explore ideas about the two subjects discussed in class.Their conversations suggested that prior knowledge of the syntactic features of HKE might raise students’awareness of the grammatical differences between the variety and the standard.The analysis also suggested that introducing the linguistic view of HKE to students might render them optimistic about their variety,helping them identify the situations where the variety would be tolerant of and settings where Standard English would be expected.The study suggested that such an intervention might facilitate students’learning of Standard English for academic purposes and practices of English in actual professional communication.Upon the improvement or advancement,they will position themselves more powerfully in the dichotomy between the standard and non-standard.More formal research on a similar or relevant topic is required to validate the impact of understanding HKE on learning academic writing.

Validity Study on the Test Paper of the Academic English Reading and Writing Course

The aim of this study is to conduct the validity analysis of the test paper of the academic English reading and writing course referring to the freshmen of non-English majors in a university of Technology in Shanghai.The validity is mainly analyzed from these three aspects:the content and construct validity,the reaction process,and the internal structure of the test paper.And the principles of language assessment in the design of the test paper are given in this study.The validity study was also conducted in a class with 42 freshmen,and the scores of them were analyzed through the internal correlation coefficient from Statistic Package for Social Science(SPSS)25.0.Finally,the validity of the test paper is concluded.

A Comparative Analysis of Syntactic Complexity in Applied Linguistics Abstracts Written by Chinese Novice Writers and Native English Advanced Writers

The rhetorical structure of abstracts has been a widely discussed topic, as it can greatly enhance the abstract writing skills of second-language writers. This study aims to provide guidance on the syntactic features that L2 learners can employ, as well as suggest which features they should focus on in English academic writing. To achieve this, all samples were analyzed for rhetorical moves using Hyland’s five-rhetorical move model. Additionally, all sentences were evaluated for syntactic complexity, considering measures such as global, clausal and phrasal complexity. The findings reveal that expert writers exhibit a more balanced use of syntactic complexity across moves, effectively fulfilling the rhetorical objectives of abstracts. On the other hand, MA students tend to rely excessively on embedded structures and dependent clauses in an attempt to increase complexity. The implications of these findings for academic writing research, pedagogy, and assessment are thoroughly discussed.

Main Problems and Countermeasures in Writing English Major Papers

According to the Degree Regulations of the People’s Republic of China,our country implements a three-level Bachelor’s,Master’s,and Doctoral degree system,graduates at all levels must pass the course examination and thesis defense before they can obtain a degree certificate.It can be seen that writing academic papers is a very important skill.For English majors,academic papers need to be written in English to illustrate their academic achievements.However,judging from the current papers of English majors,there are prominent problems in thesis writing,such as:blind selection of topics,empty content,scattered research,and improper attitudes of students.This study mainly adopts the literature method,on the basis of reading academic writing-related literature and English majors’paper,the author finds out the commonalities of English major students’academic writing and puts forward effective countermeasures.This study will provide new strategy for English majors to improve their thesis writing ability,avoid making general mistakes,and to a certain extent,reduce the tutoring pressure for essay instructors,so as to improve the academic writing quality of English majors.

A Corpus-driven Contrastive Study on Reporting Verbs in Research Articles

The use of reporting verbs is a common way in the collaborative construction of new knowledge by academic writers and readers.Most researches that concerns reporting verbs are limited to mono-lingual studies.Contrastive Phraseology is a newly emerging subfield of Contrastive Linguistics from the perspective of Phraseology,which aims at comparing the multi-lingual phrases in form,meaning and function.This research analyzed the Chinese equivalents of English reporting verbs aided by the comparable corpora.It is found that there is no equivalence of Chinese and English reporting verbs in research articles,and evaluative reporting verbs is more frequently used in English research articles.This study fundamentally shed light on the contrastive study of reporting verb phrases cross language.

Teaching Second Language Vocabulary:the Role and Application of the AWL

This paper focuses on the role and application of AWL in science-related subjects,namely the issue of whether or not students in science-related majors is advantaged or disadvantaged in using the Academic Word List(AWL)in their academic writing assignments as the imbalance of word frequency in AWL.Participants(n=18)are obliged to answer the Questionnaire.Furthermore,if needed,a brief interview would be arranged on some uncertain questions.Results show that learning and acquiring academic vocabulary would benefit participants in research articles,while AWL is inadequate for students in science-related disciplines in their academic writing.We claim that students in science-related majors may be disadvantaged than other majors’students in using Coxhead’s Academic Word List,and a wordlist screened out from science-related corpus perhaps more suitable for ESP students.Meanwhile,AWL,as a role of reference,would aid language learning or acquisition.

A Corpus-based Study of Interactional Metadiscourse in Dissertation Abstracts

Although much previous research has examined the expression of interactional metadiscourse in different registers,little is known about the ways writers express interactional metadiscourse in part-genres such as dissertation abstracts.This study explores interactional metadiscourse in doctoral students’English dissertation abstracts in material science and applied linguistics.The analysis is based on two self-built corpora of student writing:60 dissertation abstracts in material science and 60 dissertation abstracts in applied linguistics.Using Hyland’s(2005)model of interactional metadiscourse,this study compared the employment of metadiscourse resources in the two corpora.Findings of the analysis show that the students in applied linguistics use significantly more interactional devices than their material science counterparts.For each type of interpersonal resource,namely,hedges,boosters,attitude markers,self-mentions and engagement markers,significant differences were found.The results reveal students’increasing awareness of the authorial identity in academic writing.The study has practical implications for the teaching of academic writing.

A Contrastive Study of Self-Sourced Reporting Sentence Stems in English and Chinese Journal Articles

Self-representation has been widely established as a linguistic strategy to construct authority for better acceptance in academic writing.Self-sourced reporting sentence stems refer to the recurrent pre-constructed clausal semi-fixed sequences that perform the function of elaboration of the author’s argument.The present study adopts the Idiom Principle and conducts contrastive phraseological studies on the form and functions of self-sourced reporting sentence stems using comparable and parallel corpora.The study shows that(a)there exist in journal articles bountiful self-sourced reporting sentence stems;(b)sentence stems are the integration of meaning and form,and can be regarded as units of equivalence;and(c)self-sourced reporting acts are significantly different between English and Chinese academic cultures.The findings of this study could provide suggestions for teaching of academic writing,as well as translation practices.

Towards Positivity:A Large-Scale Diachronic Sentiment Analysis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in China

With its rising number of publications and expanding international collaborations,China's humanities and social sciences(HSS)research is displaying its potential for global prominence.Researchers have been exploring the development of China's HSS from different perspectives.However,the examinations from the perspective of sentiment analysis are scanty.Our aim is then to examine the sentiment features in Chinese HSS academic writing,by analyzing a large-scale corpus with over 275 million characters and with a time span from 2000 to 2020.Considering that most studies only focused on abstracts,we examined both the abstracts and the full texts,as well as a direct comparison between them.We found that Chinese HSS academic writing has evolved to be more positively biased in the past two decades,showing an upward trend in the use of positive words and a slight downward trend in the use of negative words.However,the upward trend of positive words in the full texts is not that clear,resembling a fluctuating pattern.Regarding the comparison,the abstracts are more likely to use positive words while the full texts tend to use more negative words.These phenomena can be explained with the social cognitive theory,in that they may be shaped by a joint force of the nature of human beings,the nature of language,the particular socio-cultural background in China and the features of the academic genre.