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Abstract: To what extent have postmodernism and research modalities which fundamentally question the notion of the objective researcher impacted on the production of Ph.D. theses in the humanities and social sciences? This paper examines the visual and verbal representations of the writerly self through the title pages, tables of contents and introductory chapters of a corpus of 20 recent Ph.D. theses in History and Sociology from an Australian university. While affirming the dominance of the topic-based thesis macrostructure in the social sciences and humanities, it subjects the topic-based thesis category to greater scrutiny, presenting a case for the emergence of a New Humanities Ph.D., marked by its construction of a reflexive self, unable to write with the classic detachment of positivism. The paper briefly considers the implications for disciplinarity and postgraduate pedagogy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To what extent have postmodernism and research modalities which fundamentally question the notion of the objective researcher impacted on the production of Ph.D. theses in the humanities and social sciences? This paper examines the visual and verbal representations of the writerly self through the title pages, tables of contents and introductory chapters of a corpus of 20 recent Ph.D. theses in History and Sociology from an Australian university. While affirming the dominance of the topic-based thesis macrostructure in the social sciences and humanities, it subjects the "topic-based" thesis category to greater scrutiny, presenting a case for the emergence of a "New Humanities" Ph.D., marked by its construction of a "reflexive self," unable to write with the "classic detachment" of positivism. The paper briefly considers the implications for disciplinarity and postgraduate pedagogy. (Contains 9 figures and 5 tables.)

This article is the result of a grounded theory investigation into the ways PhD topics are assigned by supervisors in engineering and selected by students in the social sciences/humanities in UK universities, broadly referred to as "topic arrangement", which can be regarded as one aspect of academic socialisation into academic Discourse communities. Interview data was collected from thirteen Iranian PhD students studying in different UK universities and six of their supervisors during 2000-2001. One further interview was conducted with a professor of sociology. The interviews were transcribed, thematically coded, and analysed using NUD.IST. The results show that PhD students themselves often select PhD topics in the social sciences/humanities, whereas PhD topics are often assigned to PhD students by engineering supervisors. The reason for this difference in practice between these two fields seems to stem from different ideologies on what constitutes a PhD across disciplines, as well as funded projects, which are more likely to be available to engineering supervisors and students. Throughout the paper, a modest attempt has been made to draw the attention of EAP practitioners to a redefinition of the concept of Discourse with a big "D", which includes linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of advanced academic literacy. (Contains 3 tables.)

This paper reports a corpus investigation of the Methods sections of research-reporting articles in academic journals. In published pedagogic materials, Swales and Feak [Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. (1994). Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. (2000). English in today's research world. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.], while not offering a generic structure, discuss the tendencies for Methods sections reporting research in the social sciences to be "slow" (or "extended"), and those in the physical sciences, such as medicine and engineering, to be "fast" (or "compressed")--the metaphors of speed or density relating to the degree of elaboration employed in describing and justifying the research design and process. The aim of this study is to examine the differences between fast and slow tendencies in Methods sections in terms of their internal, cognitive discourse organization. Two small corpora, each consisting of thirty Methods sections (one for each of the two groups of subjects), are analyzed in two ways. First the corpora are rater-analyzed for their use of the organizational features of a "cognitive genre" model for textual structures (see Bruce, I. J. (2005). Syllabus design for general EAP courses: a cognitive approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4(3), 239-256.) and secondly by the use of corpus software for linguistic features that characterize the model. The findings of the study suggest that "fast" Methods sections that report research in the physical sciences generally employ a "means-focused" discourse structure, and "slow" Methods sections in social science reports tend to employ a combination of "chronological" and "non-sequential" descriptive structures. The study concludes that learner writers may benefit from access to the types of general, "procedural" knowledge that these discoursal structures employ.

This study analyzes the theoretical framework (TF) section of the research article. It is based on a dataset of 20 TFs from nine linguistics journals covered by the Web of Science in its Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), especially those related to applied and social aspects of linguistics. Adopting a contextualist view of rhetorical moves, this paper proposes a theory-centered perspective from which to examine the TFs of research articles. The proposed model - Creating a Theoretical Framework (CATF) - consists of three moves: Providing a theoretical background, Establishing a theoretical framework, and Sharpening the significance/focus of one's study that uses the framework. Each move is achieved by a combination of strategies. The results show that although the combination and sequence of strategies in each move may vary, certain strategy patterns occurred frequently. This paper offers pedagogical suggestions regarding the teaching of the TF section and concludes with remarks on connections between the CARS and CATF models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Genre Analysis Swales encouraged us to see genres in terms of the communities in which they are used and as a function of the choices and constraints acting on text producers. It is this sensitivity to community practices which make genre a rich source of insights into two key concepts of the social sciences – community and identity . In this paper I take up these themes to explore the relationships between community expectations and the individual writer. To do so I use a corpus approach to recover evidence for repeated patterns of language which encode disciplinary preferences for different points of view, argument styles, attitudes to knowledge, and relationships between individuals and between individuals and ideas. The paper attempts to show how genre can offer insights into the ways actors understand both the here-and now interaction (the context of situation) and the broader constraints of the wider community which influence that interaction (the context of culture), revealing something of actors' orientations to scholarly communities and the ways they stake out individual positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the past decade, the use of a shared language in research communication has brought about a rich scholarly debate on the advancement of English as the common language for research publication and dissemination. This paper seeks to further the debate by reporting on the research communication practices and attitudes towards the role of English among social sciences scholars in Romania, a Central-Eastern European context that has received little research attention from this perspective. As a pilot empirical study, we examine a local scholarly community (the Bucharest University of Economic Studies) in which different uses are allocated to English, to the local (national) language and to other foreign languages and, therefore, linguistic imperialism is only a partially but not totally convincing explanatory framework. Our findings further reveal ambivalent attitudes. Although almost half of the subjects feel the dominance of English gives an unfair advantage to English native-speaking academics, almost all acknowledge the need for a shared language of research and personally feel more advantaged in their work by the use of English as a shared research language. We contrast the reported attitudes with other bi-/multiliterate research contexts and suggest policy implications at a university level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Research on how EAL academics in the social sciences engage in international publication has been limited. The case of EAL management academics is potentially interesting because the international standard-seeking business schools around the world, including those in China, are increasingly subscribing to journal ranking systems in which North America-based journals have an overriding presence. At the same time, within the management discipline there has been a growing call for studying the business firms in emerging market countries (such as China), as this research can potentially inform both local and global practices while contributing to the global management knowledge. In this paper I report an interview-based study with 14 English-publishing management academics from seven universities in China. The study, which aimed to understand the participants' perspectives and practices in the publication endeavor, generated findings that highlighted the impact of performative pressure imposed by journal ranking lists, the importance for the academics to capitalize on complementary resources through international collaboration, the potential challenge of writing in English, and the value of knowledge exchange with business practitioners. The study brought forth issues to echo and extend the literature and its findings have implications for policy makers and EAP professionals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Since the 1990s cross-cultural studies of academic genres are becoming increasingly relevant. One genre that has recently attracted cross-cultural attention is the academic book review. The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into what is expected in terms of overall critical attitude towards the books under review when writing in this academic genre for international journals by comparison to what is conventional in journals of smaller discourse communities. Based on two comparable corpora of 20 academic book reviews of literature in English and 20 in peninsular Spanish, the study compares how much and what kind of critical attitude (positive vs. negative) is typically displayed by expert L1 writers of such texts. Critical attitude is defined in terms of ‘critical acts,’ which are identified and measured in a way that takes the co-text and the context into account. The results show that the peninsular Spanish writers of literary academic book reviews are much less critical in general and show a much lower tendency to evaluate the book negatively than their Anglo-American counterparts. Results are discussed in the light of information provided by informants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]