Taiwan International ESP Journal/台灣專業英語文期刊
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台灣專業英語文學會,正常發行
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- 期刊
- OpenAccess
Editorials are an important part of newspapers and can be considered the voice of the newspapers. When writing editorials, journalists must express their own views, whilst taking into account the expectations of the readership. One way to accomplish this need is through the use of first-person pronouns. The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the use of first-person pronouns in the editorials of two English language newspapers in Taiwan. I created two corpora, one from the Taipei Times and the other from The China Post. The entire corpus contained all editorials published by both newspapers between January 1 and May 31, 2017. As expected there were no examples of singular first-person pronouns. The China Post used plural first-person pronouns much more frequently than the Taipei Times. This was especially evident in the use of inclusive plural first-person pronouns. As a result, The China Post had more examples of word clusters with We than the Taipei Times. The only similarity between the two newspapers came in the use of inclusive plural first-person pronouns to refer to Taiwan, Taiwanese people or foreign residents in Taiwan as opposed to people in general. The results showed differences in the use of plural first-person pronouns between the two newspapers. This is interesting as they should be similar in their style as they are both located in Taiwan and published in English. One conclusion from this paper is the Taipei Times, should consider adding first-person pronouns to their editorials. Additional studies should look at other English language newspapers in the region (e.g., The Japan Times, The Korea Times) to discover how the two Taiwanese newspapers compare to their Asian peers.
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The case-based method in business English teaching usually follows processes of case selection/creation, analytical reading, group discussion and evaluation. However, few studies address the use of the case-based method for specific disciplinary contexts such as food science and engineering. This study reports the use of the case-based method in one business English course for twenty-five food science and engineering undergraduates in China through questionnaires with open-ended questions and researcher’s participant observation and reflection to address participants’ perceptions and identify their recommendations for improving the teaching process. The case studies were run in every unit of the course, during which participants in small groups were assigned background reading, group discussion, oral reporting and case-based writing. The findings are as follows. The participants’ perceptions are that the case studies are challenging due to inadequate language proficiency, limited time, and unclear objectives. They reported that the case studies reflected real world practice and that the case studies contributed to language and communication skills development. Recommendations for business English teaching professionals include increasing business knowledge input in the case studies. During the teaching process, the case study activities should be diversified from reporting to other communicative approaches, such as role play, debating and use of video. Teacher participation in the case studies is also encouraged. The selection of more interesting topics, such as job interviews and negotiation, was also recommended. Case-based writing and group discussion are especially useful teaching activities for career development and academic studies. This study has positive implications for further enhancement of business English teaching practice in both China and worldwide contexts.
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This paper is a methodological exploration of history theses that analyses intra-disciplinary variations using a statistical technique, correspondence analysis. Many previous studies concerning academic discourse variations had to rely on pre-set externally classified genres, disciplines, fields, and so on, without questioning the validity of such pre-existing text-type boundaries. However, a valid method for drawing text-type boundaries in a corpus has not yet been established in academic discourse studies. In particular, intra-disciplinary studies face difficulties due to the fuzziness of official boundaries (i.e., fields and sub-fields) within disciplines. This paper is a methodological attempt at quantifying the variations of move components, without presetting boundaries, in an intra-disciplinary corpus. It explores the potential of the quantification of the co-occurrence patterns of move components to describe variations. The correspondence analysis in this study brought to light patterns of co-occurrence, and visualises trends (patterns associated with moves) in a history thesis corpus. The paper concludes that a corpus itself can show evidence for genres and text types without assuming pre-existing boundaries in the corpus, and that a correspondence analysis enables a statistically-evidenced corpus-driven description of move componential profiles (trends) of a corpus. The paper suggests that this methodology can be applied to analyse the same academic genres of other disciplines and expanded to diachronic research. The findings of the paper suggest that quantifying the variations of move components may reveal many undetected features of genres and text types. The paper concludes that, despite the somewhat widespread belief that corpus linguistics falls short of giving a full account of the dynamism of genre, it can provide a snapshot of a phase of evolving genres and text types, with a refinement in corpus processing and an appropriate utilisation of statistical techniques.
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Voice construction in academia is social, and involves weighing the complex interplay of various factors. This study explores the simultaneous influence of three social factors - disciplinary culture, writers' cultural background and rhetorical purpose - on writers' voice construction in writing research articles (RAs). Adopting a corpus-based approach and using Hyland's taxonomy of stance markers in analyzing RAs written by L1 and L2 writers in two disciplines, electrical engineering (EE) and applied linguistics (AL), results of quantitative analyses showed that disciplinary culture, among other factors, seems to play a dominant role in regulating academic writers' authorial presence. On the whole, writers in AL used stance markers much more frequently than writers in EE, while hedges occurred more than boosters in AL, but vice versa in EE. Also, the stance markers preferred by L1 and L2 writers were different. Finally, the high occurrence of boosters in conclusion sections of EE suggests a link between rhetorical purposes and authorial voice construction. An understanding of the various factors involved in voice construction could be of great pedagogical value since strategic management of self-representation conforming to disciplinary and general academic conventions could enhance the persuasiveness of RAs.