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Interest in language variation is a staple of English for Academic Purposes research and underpins its distinctive character as a field of inquiry. It is the specific nature of language use which defines EAP, yet this definition has been established almost entirely on the basis of inter-discoursal studies, with comparisons of register, genre, discipline, first language, etc. dominating our understanding. In this paper we take a different approach and focus on variation within the field, and specifically within its flagship journal, JEAP. Categorising every paper between volume 1 and 52 as principally taking a textual, critical, contextual or pedagogical orientation, we explore writers’ preferences for metadiscourse use. The differences which emerge can be attributed to the argumentation preferences of sub-fields and their knowledge-making practices. The findings offer evidence of intra-disciplinary variation in discoursal preferences and hopefully contribute to our understanding of both the journal and our field.

Since its emergence in the 1960s, ESP has become a key aspect of language teaching and research. This paper traces the last 30 years of this journey to show its emergence from the periphery of applied linguistics to a serious force on the world stage. To do this we use bibliometric techniques to track changes in ESP research through an analysis of all 3,500 papers on the Social Science Citation Index since 1990 dealing with ESP topics. We identify which topics have been most prevalent and which authors, publications, journals and countries most influential over time. The results indicate that classroom practices remain central to the discipline and that there has been a consistent interest in specialised texts, particularly written texts, and in higher education and business English, with a massive increase in attention devoted to identity and academic and workplace discourses. The global interest in these questions is shown by the range of authors, diversity of geographical sources and the uptake of papers in a range of fields. We believe our findings may interest both ESP professionals in identifying crucial publishing areas and academics fascinated by the emergence of a new discipline.

3MT (Three-minute thesis) presentations, in which students communicate their theses to non-specialist audiences within three minutes, have emerged as an important academic genre, echoing current practices in scientific communication where researchers report their research work to a heterogeneous audience. Although increasing attention has been paid to 3MT presentations, we still lack sufficient knowledge of how presenters should communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience. To address this gap, this corpus-based study investigates the rhetorical organization of moves (i.e. discoursal units serving various coherent communicative functions in text) in 80 3MT presentations from six disciplines. It is found that orientation, rationale, purpose, methods and results are five obligatory moves, among which the results move comprises more than one-fifth of the total length. The rationale and results moves are more often applied in hard sciences than in soft knowledge fields. The findings shed light on advanced academic literacy and how students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience.

It is one of the concerns of EAP to bridge the disparity of discursive practice between novice and expert writers, but the comparison is largely made across a broad knowledge field and little is known about the likely divergence within a disciplinary divide. In this study, we explore the epistemic positioning in research writing by PhD students and expert writers across applied and pure science disciplines. By focusing on hedges and boosters as its main devices, we examine their forms and functions in the academic texts. Results show that PhD students in applied disciplines use significantly fewer epistemic devices than experts but no significant difference was found in pure sciences. Apart from the differences in linguistic choices, student writers show a preference for authorial positioning at the outset of academic texts while professionals tend to comment on research findings and establish a persuasive interpretation of their value. Additionally, novice writers are inclined to hedge on numerical information (about) but expert writers hedge on claims (likely). We discuss the results from the perspectives of disciplinary epistemology and writer identity. Pedagogical implications are raised on the teaching of epistemic positioning and the enculturation of disciplinary stance in academic writing classrooms.

Metadiscourse is the commentary on a text made by its producer in the course of speaking or writing, revealing something of how communication involves the personalities, attitudes and assumptions of those who are communicating. It offers a framework for understanding communication as social engagement and helps reveal how writers and speakers consider their audience in creating texts. This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to trace the growing interest in metadiscourse since its early incarnations in the 1980s. To do so we analysed all 431 papers relating to metadiscourse in the core collection of the Web of Science between 1983 and 2020, dividing the corpus into two periods following the massive increase in interest after 2006. We identify which topics have been most prevalent, which authors and publications most influential and which disciplines and journals most active in citing the metadiscourse literature. The findings show the importance of academic and business writing, cross-disciplinary, language and genre studies, and the increasing predominance of an interpersonal model. These findings may be of interest to those working in discourse analysis and the study of social interaction.

Central to successful communication is the writer/speaker’s ability to make statements about the external, experiential world coherent, intelligible and persuasive to a particular audience. This is the domain of metadiscourse, the language we use to help others interpret, evaluate, and react to propositional information in ways that we intend (Hyland, 2005; Adel & Mauranen, 2010). Following a relatively slow start in the early 1980s, metadiscourse has become one of the dominant ways of analysing discourse, particularly written texts. A search of Scopus returns 620 papers on the topic and Google Scholar over 25,600. Metadiscourse, therefore, is a concept which has found its time, and in this special issue we explore some recent facets of the concept and why it has established itself so firmly as an analytical tool in applied linguistics.

Covid-19, the greatest global health crisis for a century, brought a new immediacy and urgency to international bio-medical research. The pandemic generated intense competition to produce a vaccine and contain the virus, creating what the World Health Organization referred to as an ‘infodemic’ of published output. In this frantic atmosphere, researchers were keen to get their research noticed. In this paper, we explore whether this enthusiasm influenced the rhetorical presentation of research and encouraged scientists to “sell” their studies. Examining a corpus of the most highly cited SCI articles on the virus published in the first seven months of 2020, we explore authors’ use of hyperbolic and promotional language to boost aspects of their research. Our results show a significant increase in hype to stress certainty, contribution, novelty and potential, especially regarding research methods, outcomes and primacy. Our study sheds light on scientific persuasion at a time of intense social anxiety.

Academics today are working in a time of intense pressure in research publishing, with greater expectations, more explicit incentives and fiercer competition than ever before. In this paper we explore whether this has led authors to rhetorically ‘sell’ or ‘hype’ their studies. Based on a corpus of 360 articles in leading journals in four disciplines at three periods over the past 50 years, we trace the use of 400 ‘hyping’ words which seek to promote, embellish or exaggerate aspects of research papers. Our results show a massive increase in these items with twice as many hypes in every paper. We also show that increases are most marked in the hard sciences and that hyping displays a greater willingness by authors to display positive attitude, underline their contribution and to hype research primacy, methods and the author's prior research. We discuss these findings in the context of current career pressures on academics.

The last 50 years have seen considerable changes in both research and publication practices in international English-medium arenas, and also witnessed a shift in argument styles in academic texts over these years (e.g. Hyland and Jiang, 2019). However, little attention was given to the rhetorical roles of nouns in diachronic studies of professional research writing. This is surprising since academic writing is an extremely noun-heavy register and novice writers often find nominal expressions difficult. In this study, we examine what are called metadiscursive nouns, a type of unspecific abstract nouns, in our diachronic corpus of disciplinary research writing to see whether they have increased in recent decades. It is found that this N pattern is most frequent overall, but hard scientists made increased use of quality nouns to promote the value of their research outcome while writers in the soft disciplines prefer evidential nouns for factual support to their knowledge claims. All these point to the need to include metadiscursive nouns into the rhetorical repertoire of metadiscourse and to emphasise their functions in the course of using English for research and publication purposes.

This study investigates the introductory it pattern (as in it is important that the technique looks effective) in six varied registers in the British National Corpus (BNC), exploring how it is used...

Figure legends, a descriptive statement accompanying a graph, is an essential component of science writing, and novice writers often find it difficult to write an adequate and plausible one. However, almost no discourse analysis has been done of this short yet important part of research articles. Taking a corpus-driven approach, this study explores the use of keywords and lexical bundles in figure legends in order to understand how the discourse is constructed by the salient recurrent single and multiple lexical items. Results show that in figure legends writers are most concerned with the textual descriptions of blue and red as markers of contrasting scientific items and bars and images as representative of graphic shapes. Additionally, writers also frequently use shown and indicated to introduce the demonstrative relationship between graphic elements and scientific information. Further, noun/prepositional bundles account for the overwhelming proportion, followed by verb-related and then clause-related forms, while research-oriented functions of bundles are more frequently used than text and participant-oriented functions. The results offer useful pedagogical input and help novice and L2 writers come to grips with this part-genre.

This paper explores changes in the use of an important pattern used by writers in all disciplines to present an authorial stance: the structure Hyland and Tse call evaluative that. This construction allows writers to front-load utterances with attitudinal meanings and offer an explicit evaluation of the proposition which follows. Linguists have tended to regard this as separate patterns, but seeing it as a single structure of a matrix clause [evaluation] + that clause [evaluated entity] enables us to recognize a single evaluative purpose with a variety of rhetorical options for writers. Here we examine the contribution of this explicit that pattern to the key genre of the academy, the research article, and map changes in its use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from four disciplines. We find that this structure is widely employed in these papers, with an average of 53 cases per paper in the 2015 data, but occurrences per 10,000 words have declined by about 20% with fairly uniform falls across disciplines. We track these diachronic and disciplinary changes and seek to explain them in terms of changing rhetorical practices.

This study explores the longitudinal development of L2 academic ‘stance’ features resulting from instruction in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at a university in Hong Kong. We analysed the frequency and wordings of hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention within a 205,682 word longitudinal corpus of essays and reports collected over a semester's instruction via pre-, mid- and post-instruction submissions, alongside data on submission grade. Data was analysed for frequency and wording differences alongside mixed-effect models to confirm the impact of instruction on the data. Results show significant longitudinal variation in the frequency of hedging, boosting, marking attitude and self-mention devices as the result of instruction, with a rise in the use of hedging and an overall reduction in the use of boosting and self-mention, serving to leave students with a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their stance over time. We also present longitudinal genre-specific effects on stance features between essays and reports, and show how a longitudinal increase in hedges and boosters results in texts that receive a higher grade from teacher-raters. Our findings recommend explicit instruction of stance features as crucial in raising students' awareness of how to achieve persuasive academic writing.

Stance and voice are two crucial elements of social interactions in academic writing. However, their conceptual constructs are elusive and their linguistic realisation is not fully explored. A relatively overlooked feature is the “noun + that” structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause (as advantage that in Flow cytometry offers the advantage that long term is available). This construction allows a writer to express authorial stance towards complement content and attribute a voice to that stance through pre-modification. This paper examines this construction in a corpus of 60 journal articles across six disciplines extracted from the BNC corpus. Developing an expressive classification of stance nouns and the possible voice categorisation, this study shows that the structure is not only widely used to project stance and voice, but that it displays considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.

In this article we explore the ways in which academic citation practices have changed over the past 50 years. Based on the analysis of a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines in 1965, 1985, and 2015, we document a substantial rise in citations over the period, particularly in applied linguistics and sociology. This is partly because there is now so much more research to report and that recognizing previous work is much easier as a result of electronic access and hyperlinks to sources. But citation is also increasingly required as a means of appropriately embedding research more securely in disciplinary understandings. Our results also show a fall in the use of reporting structures, a growing preference for non-integral forms, for research verbs, for the present tense, and for non-evaluative structures when reporting others’ research. While patterns differ by discipline, there is a general trend towards writers suppressing human agency in knowledge-making and emphasizing the reported studies rather than those who conducted them to show how earlier research supports their own.

Medical students often lack key skills in academic writing, yet good academic writing is often a pre-requisite for employment, promotion and enculturation into the profession. This article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used for the presentation of academic stance by student writers of dentistry research reports. Adopting a contrastive, corpus-based approach, we compare student writing with that of comparable professionally-written research reports for evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention and attitude markers. Our findings indicate that professional reports exhibit a narrower set of linguistic devices than used by student writers, who tend to use a much wider range of the four stance feature types analysed for discussion of both others' and their own personal stance, both across whole texts and by section. We discuss pedagogical implications for ESP professionals working to more closely align student writing with that of professional norms.

Research article abstracts have become an important genre in all knowledge fields, playing a crucial role in persuading readers, and reviewers, to take the time to go further into the paper itself. This promotional aspect of abstracts is well known, but less discussed is the ways writers are able to skilfully foreground their claim, package the information in a cohesive and coherent manner, and craft a disciplinary stance. One such rhetorical strategy is what we are calling metadiscursive nouns. Nouns such as fact, analysis, and belief are common in abstracts and do a great deal of rhetorical work for writers. In this paper we explore the interactive and interactional functions they perform in the rhetorical moves of 240 research abstracts from six disciplines. The results show how these nouns are frequently used to frame and coherently manage arguments while, at the same time, helping writers to claim disciplinary legitimacy and promote the value and relevance of their research to their discipline.

While numerous interactive aspects of academic writing have attracted attention in recent years, one common feature which has escaped scrutiny is "existential there" (as in "there are significant differences"). Based on a corpus of 80 research articles from four disciplines, this study explores the 'secret life' of this construction, revealing how academic writers use it to organise their arguments and persuade peers of their claims. In contrast to the style guides which regard existential there as an "empty structure" to be avoided, our data show that academic authors make considerable use of it across different sections of the research article to achieve their persuasive purposes. We also discuss differences in how writers in different disciplines favour diverse accompanying head nouns to foreground the particular aspect of information their readers are likely to find most familiar and persuasive. We conclude that existential there is a key feature in the academic author's rhetorical toolbox, allowing them to build interaction with readers and claim credit for their ideas. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

3MT presentations have emerged as an important academic genre, helping graduate students to present disciplinary knowledge to wide audiences. While previous research has investigated the structuring of presentations, little is known about the rhetorical features students employ to persuade their diverse listenership. In this study, we draw on Hyland’s (2005) stance and engagement framework to explore how the popularisation of scientific knowledge has influenced the ways presenters interact with their audiences. Based on a 3MT corpus of 80 presentations from six disciplines, the results show that stance markers are more often used than listener engagement markers, while explicit mentions of self and listeners are the most common features. Additionally, presenters in the hard sciences, compared to those in soft-knowledge fields, make more use of the interactional features, but rhetorical questions are more frequently used in the soft knowledge fields. Therefore, we see this nuanced use of stance and engagement as related to the rhetorical contexts of register, genre and disciplinary propositional content. Pedagogical implications raised include developing students’ ability in the popularisation of science and their raising their awareness of disciplinary knowledge and its social relevance.

Informality has become something of a contemporary mantra as, from the denim-clad offices of internet startups to the pages of business reports, we are encouraged to shed old constraints and relax conventions. This paper explores the perception that since informality has now invaded a large range of written and spoken domains of discourse, academic writing has also followed this trend. It asks the question whether academics are now freer to construct less rigidly objective texts and craft a more inclusive relationship with their readers. Taking a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines at three periods over the past years, we explore changes in the use of ten key features regarded by applied linguists and style guide authors as representing informality. Our results show only a small increase in the use of these features, and that this is mainly accounted for by increases in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences. It is also largely restricted to increases in first person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions. We discuss these results and argue they represent changes in rhetorical conventions which accommodate more obvious interpersonal interactions in the sciences.

Engagement is the way that writers explicitly acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text, drawing them in through readermention, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives. This is a key rhetorical feature of academic writing and has been a topic of interest to applied linguists for over 20 years. Despite this interest, however, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred across different disciplines. Are academic texts becoming more interactional and if so in what ways and in what fields? Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we look for answers to these questions to determine whether reader engagement has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years. Our paper presents, and attempts to account for, some surprising variations and an overall decline in explicit engagement during this period.

This paper uses a bibliometric analysis to track changes in EAP research over the last 40 years. Based on a corpus of 12,600 EAP-related articles from 40 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals, we reveal what research topics have been most popular over time and which authors, publications and source countries have been most influential. The results show that while topics concerning teaching, learning and classroom practices, have remained popular, those with a focus on contexts and discourses have grown since 2001, with substantial attention devoted to identity, interaction and genre. The most cited authors and publications also show a marked shift towards an interest in academic writing, language description and perspectives underpinning social relationships in learning and communication. Finally, our study shows that EAP is achieving a global reach as authors affiliated with emerging centres of research, particularly China, begin to make a mark on the field. We believe these findings may be of interest to EAP professionals seeking to become more familiar with the field and as a way of mapping the emergence of EAP as a maturing discipline.

Peer review is regarded as a central pillar of academic publishing, acting as a filter for readers, guidance for authors and a screening process for editors. Despite this, however, it is a contentious and high stakes practice which is not always conducted in a mentoring or collegial spirit. The pressures on academics to publish in high impact journals means this can be a fraught experience Many academics find it an anxious and upsetting experience, and this is particularly true when reviews are overly critical or abusive. In this paper we explore extracts of reviews which authors regard as particularly harsh. Examining a corpus of 850 excerpts posted by authors on the shitmyreviewerssay website, we identify the keywords, evaluative foci and stance markers which distinguish these reviews, and which contribute to their cutting effects. In doing so we not only seek to describe these texts, but to contribute to a wider conversation concerning the feedback academics receive on their work and encourage more mentoring and formative practices.

An important component of fluent linguistic production and a key distinguishing feature of particular modes, registers and genres is the multi-word expressions referred to as ‘lexical bundles’. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings and contributing to our sense of coherence and distinctiveness in a text. These strings have been studied extensively, particularly in academic writing in English, but little is known about how they may have changed over time. In this paper we explore changes in their use and frequency over the past 50 years, drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from top research journals in four disciplines. We find that bundles are not static and invariant markers of research writing but change in response to new conditions and contexts, with the most interesting changes within disciplines. The paper also discusses methodological approaches to studying bundles diachronically.

Self-citations are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, element of academic knowledge construction and reputation-building, contributing to both the cumulative nature of academic research and helping writers to promote their scientific authority and enhance their careers. As scholarly publications become more specialized, more collaborative and more important for promotion and tenure, we might expect self-citation to play a more visible role in published research and this paper explores this possibility. Here we trace patterns of self-citation in papers from the same five journals in four disciplines at three time periods over the past 50 years, selected according to their impact ranking in 2015. We identify a large increase in self-citations although this is subject to disciplinary variation and tempered by a huge rise in citations overall, so that self-citation has fallen as a proportion of all citations. We attempt to account for these changes and give a rhetorical explanation for authorial practices.

While the tension between stylistic prescriptions and authorial practice in academic writing has attracted much attention in recent years, one common feature which is less fully explored is whether to attend demonstrative this (as in ‘this uncertainty is because … ’) or to leave this unattended (as in ‘this is because … ’). Based on a corpus of 160 research articles from eight disciplines, this study explores the authorial practice of this rhetorical choice, revealing how academic writers manage it to organize their arguments and persuade peers of their claims. In contrast to the style guides which recommend avoidance of unattended this, our data show that 35% of demonstrative this were unattended for rhetorical purposes in different knowledge fields. We also discuss differences in how writers in different disciplines favour diverse attending nouns to encapsulate the particular aspect of information their readers are likely to find most familiar, plausible and persuasive. We conclude that (un)attended this isa key feature in academic author’s interactional resources, allowing them to build interaction with readers and claim credit for their ideas.

The study of stance and how academic writers convey an attitude to their material and readers has become an important area of teaching research in EAP in recent years (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). A relatively neglected means of stance expression, however, has been the Noun Complement structure. This study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction which is associated with students' advanced academic literacy. Through a corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study compares the use of this stance construction in argumentative essays of 366 Chinese university students (L2) with those of 82 American students (L1) of similar age and educational level. Results show that the L2 students use significantly fewer instances of this construction especially in the event, discourse and cognition types of stance nouns, which are bound up with the generic conventions of argumentative essays. But they show a propensity to invest personal affect by pre-modifying the stance nouns with attitudinal adjectives and first-person possessives. The paper discusses a number of issues raised by the research and makes pedagogical suggestions for EAP writing instruction.

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows (as in ‘The fact that science has a history is not an argument against the possibility of scientific truth’). In this article, we explore the frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines.

Metadiscourse has received considerable attention in recent years as a way of understanding the rhetorical negotiations involved in academic writing. But while a useful tool in revealing something of the dynamic interactions which underlie persuasive claim making, it has little to say about the role of nouns in this process. We address this gap by exploring the rhetorical functions of what we call metadiscursive nouns (such as fact, analysis, belief) and by mapping them onto a model of metadiscourse. The study examines ‘metadiscursive noun + post-nominal clause’ patterns, one of the most frequent structures containing such nouns, in a corpus of 120 research articles across six disciplines. Developing a rhetorically based classification and exploring the interactive and interactional use of metadiscursive nouns, we show that they are another key element of metadiscourse, offering writers a way of organizing discourse into a cohesive flow of information and of constructing a stance towards it. These interactions are further shown to realize the epistemological assumptions and rhetorical practices of particular disciplines.