The Interpersonal Meanings of Texts the English Language - Annotated Bibliography Example

Name Tutor Course Institution Date Introduction This paper consists of analyses of 6 readings that deal with the issue of English language. The issues discussed here include academic purposes, academic writing, systematic functional linguistics, textual analysis, grammatical metaphors and English vocabulary. This paper analyses these articles in the following order: The first two articles examine the interpersonal meanings of texts; the next two articles focus on the management of textual resources while the last two articles are only concerned with pedagogically-oriented exploration of academic writing. Hood, S. 2004. Managing attitude in undergraduate academic writing: a focus on the introductions to research reports. In Ravelli, Louise J.; Ellis, Robert A. 2005. Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks, London: Continum. This article is a study of realization of interpersonal meanings. In this article, Hood explores the way evaluative stance is performed in the challenging environment of preliminary sections of the research papers. She argues that it is in this part that the writer needs to evaluate the domain of research and her/his personal work using interpersonal resources. Hood uses two parallel corpora to illustrate her points. The main corpus consists of undergraduate students writing whereas the other is a control corpus which involves expert writing. She uses a qualitative methodology to carry out her research and places her article in the appraisal theory. Hood explores the attitude values in academic writing. Hood uses the appraisal theory to describe the numerous ways of linguistic comprehension of interpersonal meanings in English language use. He uses attitude, in particular the affect, judgemental and appreciation sub-system of this theory, to evaluate the language by attitudinally positioning in text. Hood found out that a variety of attitudinal values, especially affect and judgement, are evident students’ essays or texts. Captivatingly, she claims that there is a pressing need to conduct further research to differentiate between grammar and genre. Hood attempts to start responding to this claim because her findings demonstrate how attitude varies when assessing the researched domain or else other research and materials. She believes that this all-inclusive stance has not been extensively advocated because it entails more complex models and clarifications and more hardly relevant results for leaning academic writing. She argues that the systemic functional model needs to be integrated with a genre-based approach. This article gives a clear clue of the aim of research in the systematic functional theory and credibly demonstrates how effective this model is in analysing academic writing. In this article, Hood postulates that academic writing can only be properly analysed from a non-expert writing perspective. Moreover, she argues that it is only within this perspective that analysing academic writing manages to maintain a positive balance between practice and theory, between theoretically-based tentative answers and pedagogically-triggered questions. Hood included language one as well as language two writing and present contributions from various research centres and countries to strengthen her arguments. However, she primarily focuses on English within an academic context. Nevertheless, she could have presented a broader, more inclusive perspective by including some researches on other languages apart from English. Jordan, R.R. (1997). English for Academic Purposes and study skills. In R. R. Jordan English for academic purposes: A guide and resource book for teachers. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-19. In this chapter, Jordan provides definitions and gives a scope that defines his book, ‘’English for Academic Purposes’’. He uses a diagram to show the relationships between several sub-disciplines of English learning and teaching. This diagram is useful in clarifying issues that still cause confusion in this profession. Jordan clearly brings out the difference between ESP and ESAP as well as the difference between EGAP and EAP. He delivers a presentation which gives a map of the various aspects of the profession. Moreover, this map serves as a very useful guide that help the reader understand the rest of his book. This chapter visibly bring out the twin responsibilities of EAP as regards providing language explicit to the English linguistic academic field and assisting learners to adjust to the global English language academic philosophies. To some extent, this chapter is essentially a summary of the entire book. Jordan has clearly discussed and presented his ideas in a logical manner making it easy to find information. This chapter tells the reader all the book is about and hence one doesn’t need to read from cover to cover to find out what it entails. A big section of this chapter contains lists. For example, it has a list grouping study skills into categories using productive and receptive skills as well as activity and skills required. Jordan addresses language skills such as listening, reading, writing, note-taking, speaking, research, library, group discussions, field wok, test taking, oral intelligibility, and comprehension. However, Jordan successfully avoids the ploy of presenting a hyped bibliography by using essential and adequate textual linking in addition to his outstanding ‘’Introspect and Discuss’’ parts that also serve to be very useful to the self-directed learners and teachers. Jordan has recommended a student-centred approach to help students acquire the necessary study skills. Moreover, he argues that there are a wide range of study skills books, including primary school, college and university, individual self-help and self-study books that students can use to enhance their language skills. From this chapter, it is clear that Jordan covers the whole domain of EAP in his book. It’s no doubt his book is one of the best and most professional such that most learning institutions tend to use it in teaching English language. Jordan has made a significant contribution in the field of English learning and teaching. This book can serve as anchor for students learning English language. Hewings, A. 2004. Developing discipline-specific writing: an analysis of undergraduate geography essays. In Ravelli, Louise J.; Ellis, Robert A. 2005. Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks, London: Continum In this article, Hewings attempt to explain the relationship between the utilization of Theme and effective academic writing. She compares the gradual improvement of writing skills between students in their first year and those in their third year of geography study. Hewings found out that the essays of first-year student demonstrated unmarked relevant themes among other written characteristics that reflect the unawareness of academic writing in students in the geography discipline. On the contrary, students in their third year of study widely exploited themes as a source for encrypting angle of the texts. This entails signalling argument development as well as their opinion on the themes analysed. Hewings examines what she considers appropriate academic writing. She focuses on textual meaning of university-level writing by use of theme. She also explores the problems of technical writing in a foreign language. This article concentrates on the issue of textual resources in relation to academic writing. Hewings uses systematic functional linguistics to present her argument. This article presents an international investigation by famous linguists as well as second language practitioners across several languages on issues relating to academic writing. She argues that academic writing is a critical skill for students interested in joining tertiary education to study English language. According to Hewings, every discipline contains its own guidelines and principles of standard pedagogic and academic discourse. He collects a wide range of essays so as to be able to correctly analyse the way these differs according to discipline. Hewings uses a principally systemic functional linguistic method to demonstrate the juxtaposition between abstract writing and cultural, educational and social environment in which these writing takes place. This article covers the writing of native as well as non-native speakers of English language. Hewings draws the case studies she uses to explain academic writing from EFL students. She explores how international English language examination system influences academic writing. Hewings argues that technology plays a significant role in pedagogic discourse. She examines academic writing in geography as well as across other different disciplines including biology, history, business and psychology. Hewings struck a perfect balance between her argument of theory and hearsays on and recommendations for practice. It is therefore a valuable resource for teaching and learning academic writing as well as for researching. Hewings’ contributions in this article are useful for those interested in systematic functional linguistics as well as those interested in adopting different approaches. Coxhead, A. 2000. A New Academic Word List. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Coxhead was interested in developing a list of academic word. He based his wordlist on a written corpus consisting of 3.5 million words, including 414 texts composed by more than 400 authors, basically found in academic textbooks and journal articles. He primarily took these books and article from four main disciplines divisions, specifically, Law, Science, Arts and Commence. Moreover, he subdivided each of the discipline into seven subdivisions. The subdivision for Arts, for example, included Linguistic, Education, Philosophy, Politics, History, Sociology and Psychology. Coxhead made sure that every division and subdivision in the corpus was of equal size as the other so as to be able to identify those vocabulary items which occurred frequently as well as broadly in the corpus. Thus, for a word to appear in the word list it had to occur several times across a number of the divisions as well as subdivisions within the corpus. For example, he did not include a word that occurred in Commerce texts but rarely in Law texts. Coxhead’s wordlist consists of an aggregate of 3,111 distinctive word items confined in word families. Coxhead’s wordlist covers around 86% of the words in her academic corpus. This implies that about 75% of the lexis of most texts includes 2,000 common families within the English language. To validate her wordlist, Coxhead include an analysis of an additional academic corpus. Her wordlist was found to include 8.6% of the additional corpus. Moreover, to prove that the wordlist covered academic words, Coxhead analysed an equal sized corpus of fiction texts. Coxhead’s wordlist contained just 1.4% of the words of the non-academic corpus. Nevertheless, the pedagogical importance of Coxhead’s wordlist has been greatly criticized by practitioners in the subfield of English for Academic Purposes. There are those who believe that there exists a reasonable amount of difference in the occurrences and maybe more significantly, the meanings, of specific words items as they are found across disciplines. Coxhead’s wordlist can therefore be said be valuable for any student preparing for academic learning, regardless of the course he/she plan to pursue, be it medicine, law, engineering or architecture. This article can help students, whether home or foreign students expand their academic vocabulary. Learning vocabulary from Coxhead’s wordlist can help students enhance their understanding of academic texts. Moreover, it can help them write essays or term papers in an academic style. Students who want to learn English as a language can use this wordlist to familiarise themselves with basic words for English. Martin.J.R. 2001. Technicality and Abstraction: Language for the creation of specialized texts. In A. Burns &C.Coffin (eds) Analysing English in a Global Context. London: Routledge. 211-228. In this article, Martin focuses on grammatical analysis of the English language. This article is extremely revealing when it comes to teaching subject-particular texts using English as a medium as Martin provides a detailed discussion of the technicality and abstraction that are critical. Martin argues that technical terms as well as abstract linguistic of the type evident in scientific texts may at times seem to be intended merely to confuse the unskilled reader. He claims that these types of language play an important role in the formation of specialized texts, especially in their ability to develop taxonomies of interdependence between scientific and technical phenomena. Martin is essentially arguing that language learning is reinforced in its pedagogical efficiency when teachers have a sharp understanding of the working of linguistic resources. According to him, a sharp understanding permit for more effective analysis of academic writing that is mainly imperative when scholars are functioning towards high stakes results, including achievement in public examinations. The challenging and ambitious goal of this article is to provide a very useful grammatical tool that may be used to analyse academic writing in its entire diverse cultural and social settings. This article is mainly adapted to the socio-linguistic and the functional. Martin draws substantially on socio-semiotic approaches, particularly systematic functional linguistic. He postulates that systematic functional linguistics is gaining strong support in the domain of language pedagogy. The aim of Martin is to provide language-teaching lecturers with abstract and concrete tools for analysis which build on other methods to linguistic analysis, including pedagogical, structural and traditional techniques. He provides an overview of various abstract approaches that can be used to analyse the English language. From his discussions it is evident that he recommends one approach over the others, that is, systematic functional linguistic. Martin provides framing standpoints for this approach through uncovering it in regard to other recent analytical approaches, philosophical, sociological and linguistic. Systematic functional theory plays a critical role in the analysis of the association between written and spoken discourse. It has provided valued understandings of the nature of the grammatical and textual structures of these two methods. Martin sets out main paradigms of text analysis in the systematic functional context. His argument of register as well as genre is initially drawn in his outline of the abstract antecedents of systematic functional linguistic and its relation with other more central modern linguistic approaches. Martin explains the specific systems of genre as well as register in details arguing that both are like parasites and can only be meaningful when using semiotic of language. Scleppegrell, M. 2004. ''Technical writing in a second language: the role of grammatical metaphor''. In Ravelli, Louise J.; Ellis, Robert A. 2005. Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks, London: Continum. In this article, Schleppegrell examines grammatical metaphor (GM) as a significant characteristic of academic writing in English language. Schleppegrell’s article departs from the creation of a new profile for USA’s students learning English as a second language at the tertiary level. These students consist of immigrant who migrated to USA when they were children or adolescents with undeveloped textual skills in their local language. This implies that these students cannot easily understand what constitutes the main characteristics of academic register. Schleppegrell argue that the effective teaching to resolve this lack of understanding is typically essential in English for particular purposes teaching that pays more attention on sentence-level analysis as well as rhetorical approaches rather than on meaning-making during the course of writings. Schleppegrell argues that students must practise developing as well as using technical languages with heightened levels of theorizing in their writings and handling general structuring and appraisal of contents. Scleppegrell finds out that students find it difficult to put up with buried thinking in their academic writing. She argues that this is provoked by the mother tongue interference of students. A perfect example of such interference includes the unbalanced remapping between linguistic and semantic classifications in the intricate metaphorical realization. For instance, this is manifested in the incongruous choice of grammatical items, including verbs for nouns or adjective for nouns. The aim of scleppegrell is to examine grammatical metaphor from an abstract perspective. To successful achieve this; she uses two models which theorize grammatical metaphor, that is, the strata and the semantic models. Scleppegrell also examines instances of grammatical metaphor. She argues that GM is a key feature of academic and scientific discourses. Moreover, she claims that GM provides a crucial contribution to the systematic functional linguistics in the domain of academic writing. She claims that although the semantic and strata models differ when it comes to theorizing and defining GM, they are closely associated with each other. According to her, the semantic model was developed from the perspective of the strata theory. This means that GM analysed in the semantic theory may be regarded as the outcome of transference of GM examined in the strata theory. She suggests that an integrated model that draws on strata as a well as semantic model is valuable in the learning of GM. Scleppegrell suggests that ESL textbooks need to focus on transcategorization exercises. Conclusion All these articles assume and examine the unavoidable bidirectional juxtaposition between context and text. From these articles I learn that academic writing is inherently associated with the pedagogical practices related to its teaching. All these articles have a shared interest in the practical consequences of their conclusions. Moreover, they share a common corpus that is tertiary, undergraduate and postgraduate academic writing. These articles have helped me understand the usefulness of systemic functional framework in learning English language. I have learnt that a student needs to develop certain skills to be successful in learning the English language. Read More