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Continuum Discourse Series Series Editor: Professor Ken Hyland, Institute of Education, University of London. Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. The Continuum Discourse Series aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable introduction to an aspect of the way language in used in real life. Other titles in the series: Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing Ken Hyland Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis Paul Baker Discourse Analysis: An Introduction Brian Paltridge Spoken Discourse: An Introduction Helen de Silva Joyce and Diana Slade (forthcoming) Media Discourse Joanna Thornborrow (forthcoming) Professional Discourse Britt-Louise Gunnarsson (forthcoming) An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (forthcoming)
Academic Discourse
English in a Global Context
Ken Hyland
Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 Ken Hyland 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Ken Hyland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9803-8 (Hardback) 978-0-8264-9804-5 (Paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Publisher has applied for CIP data.
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Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction vii viii
Points of departure What is academic discourse? Why this interest in academic discourse? Education: discourse, acculturation and learning 1.4 Knowledge: discourse, persuasion and truth 1.5 Reputation: discourse, authority and reward 1.6 Conclusions and caveats
1 1 3 5 10 14 18
Approaches Some issues in discourse analysis Textual approaches Contextual approaches Critical approaches Conclusions
20 20 25 31 38 44
Academic communities The idea of discourse community Critiques and responses In search of academic communities Final thoughts
46 46 52 58 65
Contents
Research discourses The research article The conference presentation Other research genres Conclusions
67 67 78 86 95
Popular discourses What is popular science? Two popular science genres Science journalism Conclusions
Wider worlds Economic power and cultural authority Global participation and academic discourse Conclusion and closing
Acknowledgements
While writing often seems a solitary occupation, it is always crowded with other people who have informed the text and made it what it is. I have been lucky enough to have had excellent friends and colleagues in my career who, in different ways, have helped me understand something of how language works in academic contexts. This book represents my efforts to put this understanding into words by borrowing, bending, mauling and otherwise taking-on their ideas and viewpoints. Many of those who have inspired me are mentioned in the text which follows, but I would like to express a particular debt to Vijay Bhatia, Marina Bondi, Chris Candlin, Ann Johns, Brian Paltridge, Ken Rose, John Swales and Lynn Wales for their enthusiasm, ideas and texts, which have both stimulated and sustained my interest in discourse analysis. Thanks too to my collaborator in Hong Kong, Polly Tse, for her encouragement and insights during long hours pondering over concordance lines, and to Fiona Hyland, for her support and stimulating conversations about writing and teaching.
vii
Introduction
This book is intended as an introduction to academic discourse in English and is written for students, general readers and specialists in other areas of applied linguistics or language teaching. My aim is to offer an overview of the key genres of the academy and on the way to say something about the nature of knowledge, of communication and of the practices of those who work and study in universities. The study of academic discourse is a relatively young field, but one which is rapidly attracting the attention of scholars with interests ranging from philosophical pragmatics to English for Academic Purposes. This attention is partly due to the growing significance of these discourses in all our lives as they increasingly intrude into institutional discourses around us. More directly, as ever more students enter higher education, as increasing numbers of professions demand degree level qualifications, and as academics around the world find their careers tied to their success in publishing, academic discourses come to exert a growing impact. Most obviously, communication is crucial to the work of academic communities, both from the point of view of scientific progress and of the individual academic or student seeking to make a name or pass a course. Countless students and researchers must gain fluency in the conventions of academic discourses to understand their disciplines, establish their careers and to successfully navigate their learning. Its influence also reaches outside the university as the languages of the academy appear daily on our TV screens, in our newspapers and in our mailboxes, infiltrating the discourses of advertising, public information, social services and entertainment to shape the ways we understand the world and offering a model of rationality and detached reasoning. Academic discourse, in fact, has come to be a privileged form of argument in the modern world; a demonstration of absolute truth, empirical evidence or flawless logic representing what Lemke (1995: 178) refers to as the discourse of Truth. It gives us an objective description of what the world is actually like and we, in turn, invest it with a cultural authority free of the cynicism with which we view the partisan rhetoric of politics and commerce. Perhaps the main force driving this growing interest in academic discourse is the recognition that academic communication presents considerable difficulties for many students, especially as disciplines themselves change and develop. Students have to quickly come to viii
Introduction
terms with the literacy demands of the academy, and the characteristic and changing forms of disciplinary-specific communication, by learning to use language in new ways. Nor are academics immune from these changing communicative demands. The ability to deliver lectures, to carry out administrative work, to participate in meetings, to present at international conferences and, above all, to conduct and publish research in English, are all part and parcel of every successful academics competence. In other words, the learning needs of all these groups have a particular focus in the challenges to communicative competence presented by disciplinary-specific study, by new modes of teaching and learning and by changing communicative practices within and outside the academy. Studies of academic discourse have therefore fed into the English for Academic Purposes movement. This in turn has helped to undermine the idea of a single, monolithic academic English (Hyland, 2004), to reshape the ways we understand academic literacy, and to reconceptualize how we prepare both students and academics to cope effectively with the literacy demands of the academy. This book picks up these threads to explore the nature and importance of academic discourses in the modern world. In it I seek to combine an argument concerning both disciplinary and generic variation with an accessible introduction to current thinking about key areas and issues in academic discourse. The discussion which follows is evidence based and draws on several collections (or corpora ) of academic written and spoken discourse. The written data: