“We must conclude that…”:A diachronic study of academic engagement

Hyland, Ken and Jiang, Feng (Kevin) (2016) “We must conclude that…”:A diachronic study of academic engagement. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 24. pp. 29-42. ISSN 1475-1585

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	academic writing,corpus research,directives,engagement,questions,shared knowledge
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Education and Lifelong Learning
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	12 Jan 2018 12:30
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 17:32
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65919
DOI:	10.1016/j.jeap.2016.09.003

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