Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–63

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Genres and registers of student report writing: An SFL perspectiveon texts and practices

Sheena GardnerDepartment of English and Languages, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK

Keywords:Genre analysisSystemic functional linguisticsAcademic literaciesResearch reportsStudent writing

E-mail address: sheena.gardner@coventry.ac.uk.1 The project, ‘An investigation of genres of asse

British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of

1475-1585/$ – see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.jeap.2011.11.002

a b s t r a c t

Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemicfunctional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacypractices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describeshow an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British AcademicWritten English) corpus draws on an exploration of the social context of assessed studentwriting in order to support the analysis of texts with an IMRD (Introduction, Methods,Results, Discussion) type structure as members of either the Research Report or Meth-odology Recount genre family. It also illustrates how register analysis in SFL allows theanalyst to gain insights into disciplinary contexts and ideologies through a comparison ofextracts from the methods sections of corpus linguistics, psychology and chemistryassignment texts. The paper not only shows how research into writing practices andparticipant perspectives is combined with text analysis in one project, but also arguesthat an understanding of both is essential for the application of research findings inteaching EAP.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Academic Literacies (AcLits) can be positioned as contrasting approaches tothe investigation of academic writing where SFL has been successful in explaining how meanings are construed throughwritten texts, while academic literacies builds on New Literacy Studies as ‘a framework for understanding universitywriting practices’ (Lea & Street, 1998, p. 157 italics added). As both approaches share a common heritage in Malinowsky’sdistinction between context of situation and context of culture, they are potentially compatible and complementary inresearch on student academic writing. Moreover, both aim to influence the teaching of academic writing and empowerstudent writers.

This complementarity is first considered briefly from Literacies perspectives, then in more detail from SFL perspec-tives. It is argued that genre and register analysis are central for EAP, and that it is particularly in these areas that theethnographic methods associated with academic literacies and the linguistic methods associated with SFL must worktogether. This is illustrated with examples from an investigation of genres of assessed student writing in Englishuniversities.1

ssed student writing in British Higher Education’ (ESRC 23000800) included the development of thestudent writing and a new genre family classification.

. All rights reserved.

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–63 53

2. Ethnographic investigations of literacy events and practices

Investigations of writing practices generally involve ethnography. As Lillis and Scott explain: ‘The principal empiricalmethodology inherent in an ideological model of literacy [such as academic literacies] is that of ethnography, involving bothobservation of the practices surrounding the production of texts – rather than focussing solely on written texts – as well asparticipants’ perspectives on the texts and practices.’ (2007, p. 11) Very broadly, then, we might differentiate research whichfocuses onwritten texts from research that focuses on literacy practices, whether or not each is also concernedwith the otherand with participant perspectives. Both can produce findings applicable to teaching academic writing. An example ofresearch on written texts would be the academic word list generated by conducting a key word analysis of studentassignment texts in the BAWE corpus (see Table 2 below) compared to general English texts in the British National Corpus.Top key words include I, data, therefore, ed, theory, due, analysis, et, factor, however, introduction, conclusion, essay, result,journal, university, method, value, bibliography, al, process, low, focus, thus, increase, reference, social, structure, define. Thecomplete list with information about the keyness of each item is given in Nesi and Gardner, 2012, Appendix 1.4. Typicalcollocations for each item can be found in the corpus and inform the teaching of academic writing independently of researchon related literacy practices.

In a similar manner, ethnographic research on writing practices does not require linguistic analysis of texts, as canbe seen in the investigation of bilingual literacy practices in Wales (Martin-Jones, 2009, see also Ivani�c et al., 2009). Aspart of this ethnographic study, students recorded all the events they participated in over a number of days thatinvolved reading or writing. Through observation, recording and discussion of the events and their significance withparticipants, the researchers built up a picture of literacy practices, such as internet shopping or managing a part-timebusiness, in which student writers engage regularly. This is important for understanding student writers as sociallysituated actors with competencies which can be invoked in developing academic writing strategies, such as librarysearches (cf. internet shopping) or managing research projects (cf. managing a business). A brief reflection on theubiquity of internet shopping today compared to shopping ten years ago shows how such ethnographic studies ofliteracy events also capture and illuminate changing values and cultural practices. Such studies can inform the types ofacademic writing assignment tutors develop, or strategies tutors in writing centres might use to help novice writersbuild on their existing capabilities. This project did not include systematic linguistic/multimodal analysis of studenttexts, though these have been collected and an intended subsequent phase is genre analysis (Martin-Jones, personalcommunication).

A productive focus for ethnographies of academic writing practices lies in contextualising such writing in the lives ofindividual writers. Starfield’s (2004) ethnography of how Ben positions himself in writing a sociology essay is a goodexample of a focus on an individual, his writing history in the trade union movement, his confidence as a mature student,and how these inform his academic writing performance. Starfield describes how she observed the class for eleven weeks,presumably taking field notes and becoming familiar with what was taught, how students were prepared for writing andhow Ben functioned in the class. Such ethnographic case studies of individual writers provide rich insights into features ofthe social context relevant to the production of successful academic texts. Knowledge about writers’ literacy practices canconstructively inform the teaching of academic writing, and much research in this area aims to transform the nature ofacademic writing at university to more readily accommodate the diversity of writing backgrounds (e.g. of maturestudents).

The problem for EAP with ethnographic research on writing practices arises when practices based pedagogies are notcomplemented with a focus on the wording of written texts (Prosser & Webb, 1994). As Lillis (2008, p. 59) suggests,academic literacies research is generally aligned with North American style approaches to teaching writing in writingcentres, while text-based research is more generally aligned with EAP teaching of English for specific academicpurposes for non-native speakers. North American style writing centres2 ably provide general process-oriented supportrelated to drafting and revision that helps writers clarify their writing purposes and their ideas, but without additionalattention being given to the linguistic features used by proficient writers in specific disciplinary contexts, it is difficultfor writers to draw on their previous writing histories and associated linguistic resources in producing written work atuniversity – the three text extracts in Table 6 below illustrate how differently texts with similar purposes can be wordedin different disciplines. Similarly, in an EFL context Fakhra (2009) reports that Syrian writers were expected to produce‘persuasive’ argumentative essays in English, but had been taught none of the linguistic features of modality andhedging that would allow them to do this in the manner their instructors expected. Such situations occur whereteachers or tutors have not paid sufficient attention to the linguistic resources used in academic writing, perhapsbecause they have come from an English literature background and are more focused on ideas, or they have come froma high school tradition that focuses on error correction, and have not developed skills to identify and teach the linguisticresources writers may need to be able to produce successful texts. Thus for EAP pedagogy, whether for monolingual(‘native speaker’) or multilingual (including EFL) learners of English, an academic literacies style focus on practicesalone would be found lacking.

2 I worked with such a centre for many years in Canada. Our solution then was to introduce ‘ESL-Writing’ but a greater focus on language for all couldhave been beneficial.

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–6354

3. SFL and AcLits: a shared heritage

Despite their dispositions towards investigating either texts or practices, SFL and AcLits share a focus onwriting in context.Interestingly, both approaches draw on Malinowsky’s distinction between context of situation and context of culture, whichhighlights that the significance of language in a specific situational context can only really be grasped by also understandingits meaning in the broader cultural context. For AcLits, ‘Practice offers a way of linking language with what individuals, associally situated actors, do, both at the level of ‘context of situation’ and at the level of ‘context of culture’ (Malinowski, [1923]1994)’ (Lillis, 2008, p. 374; Lillis & Scott, 2007, p. 11). In contrast, SFL builds on Firth’s (1957) development of context ofsituation explained through Register as comprising Field, Tenor and Mode. For SFL context of situation ‘specified with respectto field, tenor and mode plays a significant role in determining3 the actual choices [instances] among the possibilitiesavailable in the language as system’ (Halliday, 2009: 55). Table 1 shows the main points of contact and comparison betweenAcLits and SFL investigations of academic writing. Thus at the level of culture, AcLits focuses on practices, where SFL focuseson genres. SFL approaches to investigating academic writing will now be introduced.

Systemic Functional Linguists offer a number of different models of the relationship between ideology, context of culture,context of situation and language, and research on the modelling of context continues (Hasan, 2009).4 Indeed context ofsituation as a construct has been criticised by thosewithin and outside SFL for being vague and indeterminate (Bowcher, 2010,p.77). Nevertheless, it is an intuitively appealing and productive area of research, and central is Halliday’s widely acceptedtenet that the context of situation variables of field, tenor and mode can be systematically related to the ideational, inter-personal and textual metafunctions in language respectively (e.g. Halliday, 2009, p. 55). This is illustrated in Table 6 belowwhere the different choices of participants (e.g. broadsheets, eating behaviours, bromate), processes (e.g. feel, analyse, equi-libriate) and circumstances (e.g. in first year university girls, at each temperature) reflect the different Fields or the nature of theactivities; the choices of mood (e.g. declarative vs no mood), modality (e.g. use of modal auxiliarywould), self-reference (e.g. Ivs absence of self-reference) and appraisal (e.g. interesting vs deviant) reflect the Tenor or role relationships between writerand audience; while the Mode is reflected in choices involving cohesion (e.g. below) and thematic and information structures(e.g. human vs non-human subjects, active vs passive, use of non-finite sentence initial clauses, and nominalisation). This isexplained in more detail below in the analysis of registers in student report writing.

A distinctive feature of Martin’s (1992) model of context is the location of genres at a level of context of culture (as inTable 1). Extensive research on written academic texts (textbooks and student writing) using SFL has been done within theSydney School genre tradition developed by Martin and colleagues (Veel, 2006). The research in primary and secondaryschool academic genres has proved insightful and relevant to teaching in Australia, where it is informing the nationalcurriculum currently being introduced, and in England, where it has informed the National literacy strategy since 1999. Thegenre research on university student report writing described below builds on this tradition; specifically on the definition ofgenre as a staged goal-oriented social process realised through register (Martin, 1992, p. 505), and to a much lesser extent ondescriptions of specific genres found in school contexts. Thus for Martin, and in the research reported below, register isenvisaged as a configuration of field, tenor and mode, and distinct from genre (Table 1). So a laboratory report genre inChemistry would have a register that is similar to that of a design specification or research report genre in Chemistry, but asa genre, its staging and purpose would be more similar to a lab report genre in Physics or Biology.

ForMartin, the level of ideology focuses on ‘discourses manifested across a range of texts’ (1992, p. 296). He points towaysin which speakers from different classes, generations, ethnicities or genders may construe context in different ways (1992, p.576ff). Just as people are socialised into the language of social class or gender, so too are students socialised into the languageand ways of thinking of academic disciplines through participation in lectures, reading textbooks and writing assignments. Atthis level, we could explore how groups of psychologists, chemists or sociologists construe their disciplines: what counts asevidence, as argument or as ‘rationale’. These ideologies would be evidenced across genres and registers within thecommunity.

The cultural nature of genres is highlighted in the definition of genre as ‘the system of staged goal-oriented socialprocesses throughwhich social subjects in a given culture live their lives’ (Martin,1997, p.13). Thus genres are shaped by theircultural purpose, which in student academic writing might involve demonstrating the ability to construct an argument, toexplain entities scientifically, or to conduct independent research5. Genres are ‘realised through register’ (Martin, 1992, p.505). Registers in turn are realised through the lexicogrammar, and it is the richness and appliability of Systemic FunctionalGrammar that marks SFL approaches as distinctive among accounts of academic writing (Ravelli & Ellis, 2004).

With the shared heritage of Malinowski but complementary perspectives of AcLits and SFL, specific research projects maydraw on both approaches to different degrees. Thus where AcLits turns to examine texts, we find Lea and Street’s inclusion of

3 The exact nature of the relationship between contextual and linguistic features is contested. Material contexts create conditions which influence howmeanings are construed in texts, while strictly speaking contexts of texts are only created when texts are produced and change as the texts unfold.

4 Hasan (e.g. 2009), following Halliday, 1991, portrays register as realising context of culture in contrast to context of situation which is an instance ofcontext of culture in a similar way that language as text is an instance of language as system. This contrasts with Martin’s view; recent evidence of ongoingdebate includes Martin’s plenary for ISFC 2011 in Lisbon on modelling context, and a symposium organised by Lukin on ‘Register and context’ at Sun Yat Senin February 2011.

5 Such genres would belong to the Essay, Explanation and Research Report genre families respectively, which are three of the thirteen genre families ofassessed university student writing described in Gardner and Nesi (in press) and Nesi and Gardner (in press).

Table 1A simplified view of AcLits vs SFL investigations of academic writing.

AcLits SFL

Ideology Discourse IdeologyLiteracy practices Context of culture GenresLiteracy events Context of situation Registers (Field, Tenor, Mode)Ethnography Main method Linguistic analysis (Experiential, Interpersonal,

Textual systems)Writers and writing in context: what

socially situated writers doMain focus Written texts: how linguistic resources construe

meanings in contextTransformative Main aims Appliable

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systemic functional linguistics as one of the ‘sources’ of academic literacies, alongside ‘New Literacy Studies’, CriticalDiscourse Analysis and Cultural Anthropology (Lea & Street, 1998, p.172).

We also find shared concerns with, for instance, Street’s (2010) transformative aim of revealing ‘hidden’ features ofacademic paper writing in areas such as voice, structure and stance with SFL’s goal of being an ‘appliable linguistics’ (Hallidayand Matthiessen, 2004), and Martin’s aims of making explicit ‘secret’ features of academic genres such as the social purpose,stages, and the nature and importance of grammatical metaphor particularly to disadvantaged learners not socialised in suchgenres. These shared aims, assumptions and values between SFL and AcLits again suggest their compatibility for specificprojects. Arguably, it is not only desirable to draw on both SFL and AcLits traditions, but to not do so may severely weaken thefindings of both. Academic literacies research that ignores the nature of the texts themselves misses an important source ofinsights into literacy practices, just as SFL research that ignores insights from investigations of practices surrounding texts willhave to work much harder to construe context from texts in ways that are recognised by participants. This is particularlyimportant for genre and register analysis of academic writing where analysts are unfamiliar with the disciplinary practicessurrounding the texts they are investigating. I shall now explain how one text-focused project benefits from research intowriting practices.

4. An investigation of genres of assessed university student writing

The project involved an investigation of genres of assessed university studentwriting in England across the academy (ESRC23000800) and included the development of a corpus of student writing for analysis as texts – notably for genre analysis –and as text – notably for register analysis where patterns could be observed across hundreds of texts and contexts. Animportant strand of the project was the investigation of participant perspectives on writing practices across disciplines andlevels of study. Here ethnographic methods were used to examine writing, as in Swales’ (1998) textography, or Grabe andKaplan’s (1996) ethnography of writing, with a text-oriented rather than writer-oriented focus (Lillis, 2008, p. 359ff). Asmembers of university communities, research teammembers were participant observers, noting opportunistically everythingfromdiscussionwith students or assessmentmoderationmeetingswith colleagues, to faculty exam and curriculum boards, totop down national initiatives such as personal and professional development planning, and national subject centre teachingactivities. We examined documents from national, university, department, course, module and assignment levels, system-atically interviewed key participants including departmental directors of education, tutors and students, and worked tounderstand participants’ perspectives on assessed university student written texts and related practices. We were fortunatein being able to speak with many tutors who were experienced, interested and active in developing curricula and teachingmethods in their departments and nationally in their subject centres. As the following sections describe, this investigation ofcontexts informed our data collection, our genre classification and our register analysis.

5. Text collection and the BAWE corpus

One important aim of our investigation of the contexts in which the texts were written and assessed was to inform ourstudent text collection strategy. AsMartin and Rose point out, for the genre analysis of texts we need quality examples. ‘This inturn depends on good ethnography, drawing on the expertise of core members of a given field and whatever insider

Table 2Distribution of texts in the BAWE corpus.

LevelDisciplinary Group

1 2 3 4 TOTAL TEXTS

Arts and humanities 255 229 160 80 724Life sciences 188 206 120 205 719Physical sciences 181 154 156 133 624Social sciences 216 198 170 207 701TOTAL TEXTS 840 787 606 625 2858TOTAL WORDS 1,440,185 1,781,686 1,565,991 1,719,133 6,506,995

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knowledge outsiders can acquire’ (Martin & Rose, 2003, p. 273). Our investigation of typical assignments along degreepathways informed our data collection strategy (Alsop & Nesi, 2009), for instance, in terms of the balance of core and optionalmodules to target. An important contextual feature of the English universities where we collected texts is that most studentsare admitted with three A levels, such as Maths, Physics and Economics, or English, French and History, and studying for theseA levels has occupied most of their time over the last two years of high school or sixth form college. Then at university mostfollow a course in one department, say History or Economics, though joint degrees such as English and History are alsocommon. Much of the writing collected is therefore written by students and assessed by tutors fully immersed in theirdiscipline(s). These contextual features are important, as they locate the student in a particular place and time; otherscountries offer a broader curriculum in the last years of school and first years of university, and broader qualifications, such asthe International Baccalaureate, are growing in popularity in England.

As we were interested in describing genres of proficient university student writing across many disciplines and levels ofstudy, we investigated the meanings of letter, numerical, descriptor and degree classification bands in assessed writing, andcollected assignments that had been written as part of regular coursework and graded in ways that we interpreted as betterthan a pass or ‘good’ grade and characterised as a ‘merit [very good]’ or ‘distinction [excellent]’. These formed a corpus of 2858texts, stratified by four disciplinary groups and four levels of study, corresponding to first through third year undergraduateand first year postgraduate.

The texts in the BAWE corpus have been tagged (Ebeling & Heuboeck, 2007; Heuboeck, Holmes, & Nesi, 2010) for featuresthat we anticipated might be significant: the assignment title, level, date, and grade; the module title, department, disci-plinary group; the writer’s age, first language, gender, extent of schooling in Britain, and degree course. Information about thenumber of words, sentences, paragraphs, tables, figures, block quotes, formulae, lists, abstract, words per sentence andsentences per paragraph is also included, as is genre family, an attribute given following analysis of the texts in their contextsof culture.

6. Contexts of culture and genres of student academic writing

Working with Martin’s concept of genre as a staged goal-oriented social process, we revisited layers of contextual data tomake sense of the purpose of the texts. Without this investigation of assessment practices in context, our classification wouldhave been more influenced by existing classifications, by other studies of different texts in different contexts, or by our ownexperience. The texts in the BAWE corpus were read and grouped into genres and genre families (groups of similar genres)according to their stages and social purpose. Thiswas a grounded, recursive activity.We (principally Gardner andNesi) grouped,and regrouped, similar texts, continuously refining notions of social purpose and staging through discussion and reflection onthe texts and contextual information about practices, until we were satisfied with our classification. We recognise that thisexercise was informed by evidence from our own experience of teaching academic writing across disciplines and universities,and by our own experience of analysing, reading about and discussing the nature of academic writing with colleagues.Importantly it was also informed by our investigations of the social context, as the genre analysis below will now show.

Much of what is known about academic writing has been learnt from studies of professional writers in published journalarticles, where many research papers follow an IMRD-type pattern of Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. This isa useful heuristic and one that is often clearly marked by subheadings. We were able to use this knowledge to explore theextent to which such structures are applicable to student writing. In module handbooks we found explicit guidance not onlyon which IMRD-type sections to include but also on their purpose and content:

Reports of practical work and projects include the following sections: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results,Discussion, References, Appendices.The main purpose of your Introduction is to explain why it makes sense to betesting your hypothesis. (Psychology)The Methods section should give an account of the experimental procedure, such that an independent researcher withknowledge of the field could repeat the work. (Biology)

In terms of assignments over years of study, lecturers across disciplines told us that:

Lab reports have a distinctive formal structure. Final-year project reports have a similar structure, though are longer.(Biology)[in the first year] students have to learn to explain: what happened; why it is interesting; how it relates to psychologicaltheory. [at upper levels] the main difference is that students set themselves the problem. (Psychology)

And in this way we built up a picture of similarities and differences among what we knew about published academicwriting, about IMRD structures in our own students’ writing in applied linguistics, and what happens in other departments.

7. IMRD macrostructure in two genre families

With an understanding of the contexts and tutor expectations, we then turn to the texts. An initial stage of genre analysisof the texts themselves involves consideration of framing devices such as headings and topic sentences or hyperthemes,which point to the expressed purposes and stages of the assignment texts. Headings such as Introduction, Methods, Results,and Discussion, with their disciplinary variants (Gardner & Holmes, 2009), are widespread in student assignment

Table 3Psychology project and experiment section weightings.

N words % Project headings Practical headings N words %

116 2 Abstract Abstract 98 61913 30 Introduction Introduction 179 11641 11 Method Method 330 2036 Participants Design 40357 Materials Participants 79248 Design & Procedure Materials 86

– Procedure 1251281 20 Results Results 611 382343 37 Discussion Discussion 403 256294 100% 1621 100%

References (51) References (1)1761 Appendices (4) –

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macrostructure. When we analysed the assignments further in relation to what we had learnt about writing practices, wediscovered that where, for instance, the purpose of the assignment was to develop practical lab skills, the introduction anddiscussion sections were very short. Where the purpose was to conduct a complete research project, the sections were morebalanced in length, as pairs of assignments from Psychology, Engineering and Biology suggest.

The project and practical assignments selected from Psychology are similar in many ways: both report studies whichinvolved administering questionnaires to fellow students to test psychological theories. In the project report the aim is tofind out about links between avoidance, coping and alcohol consumption, and in the practical report the focus is on linksbetween experiences and the emotions of guilt, shame and embarrassment. The macrostructure of the two assignments asshown by the headings is very similar, but the proportion of the assignment allocated to each section is different, as shownin Table 3.

While the introduction to the project report is almost 2000 words long (30%) and contains over 40 citations, the intro-duction to the practical report is only 180 words (11%), with one citation. The research project assignment resemblesa published journal article where the aims of the study are contextualised in the literature, while the practical is written upprimarily for the module tutor who appreciates why this is an appropriate topic to investigate and is more interested in whatthe student does (methodology), what she finds (results) and whether she can write this up. Thus most of the practicalassignment (58%) is concernedwith a recount of the study. Only six sentences are devoted to other sources in the Introductionand only one in the Discussion, as we can see in the following extract.

IntroductionGuilt, shame and embarrassment are emotions of similar origin and type, in that they are moments of unpleasant

self-consciousness that we all experience. It is sometimes believed that they are basically the same. However Tangneyet al., (1996) described these emotions as distinctly separate experiences. A study was conducted amongst under-graduates to determine what sort of experiences lead to feelings of guilt, shame and embarrassment, and howdifferent the three emotions were considered to be. It seemed that shame and guilt were similar emotions, withshame a more public experience, and that embarrassment was the most public of all, and milder than shame or guilt,(Tangney et al., 1996)..

Discussion.This was generally as expected and followed the pattern of results given by Tangney (1996).

This suggests the practical was designed less to engage with the literature and more to develop and demonstrate under-standing of disciplinary procedures. Thus where the bulk of the research project is devoted to the literature review and thediscussion (67%), the bulk of the small empirical study is devoted to an account of the methods and the results (58%).

Through interpretation of the social context, the macrostructures and the texts themselves, two different genres wereproposed: project report and practical report in Psychology. Similar differences were found across the sciences, which led tothe identification of two different genre families which we called Research Report andMethodology Recount. For example, inEngineering we can compare headings in a third year project and a second year Fluid Mechanics lab report (Table 4). Both arereports of experiments conducted by a team rather than individuals. The project includes a literature reviewwith 29 citationsand 19 references, while there is no literature review section in the lab report, and only three references, all of which arecourse materials (lecture notes, a text book and a data book).

The comparison in Table 4 of theweighting of the main sections shows the importance of the Literature Review (16%> 0%)in the research project in comparison to the ‘Theory’ (18% > 2%) in the practical. The practical assignment macrostructureemphasises Results (15% > 7%) over Interpretation and Discussion of the project (42% > 28%), though the headings andsections do not match exactly across the two assignments.

Table 4Engineering project and practical section weightings.

N words % Project main headings Practical headings N words %

250 3 Summary Summary 214 10216 2 Introduction 0 01523 16 Literature Review 0 0230 2 Theory Theory 397 181517 16 Equipment & Methods Equipment & Methods 323 15694 7 Results Results 326 154065 42 Observations and Interpretation Discussion 612 281114 12 Conclusion Conclusion 300 149609 100% 2172 100%19 References References 34 Appendices Appendices 1

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–6358

A third example comes from a similar pair of assignments in Biology: a level 3 aquaponics project and a Masters levelpractical report on vegetation after burning (Table 5). Again the project contains more detailed section headings omittedhere.

Similar differences emerge: the project includes a Literature Review of over 2000 words, 43 citations and 50 refer-ences; while the Results and Analysis sections in the practical report amount to almost half the assignment word-count(49%).

The comparison of projects and practical experiments across these pairs of similar assignments in three disciplinessupports what the tutors, course materials and text production practices suggested: that although both could beconsidered experiment reports, they differ in function. Although in some disciplines, such as Psychology, full researchreports were found from the lower levels, in other disciplines Methodology Recounts are common in lower levels ofundergraduate study, while Research Reports are found in final year undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Evidence insupport of distinct practices with two distinct purposes was found in documentation at all levels. For instance, theQuality Assurance Agency (QAA) states that university graduates should be able to demonstrate ‘an ability to deployaccurately established techniques of analysis and enquiry within a discipline’ (QAA, 2008, p. 18), as evidenced inMethodology Recounts, and then later to ‘apply the methods and techniques that they have learned. to initiate andcarry out projects’ (QAA, 2008, p. 19), as evidenced in Research Reports.

While an investigation of participant perspectives and practices in context helps us develop an understanding of the socialpurposes, an investigation of the texts shows us areas where they are linguistically quite distinct. Without investigations ofcontext which illuminated the different social purposes of the texts in context, we might have grouped all these simply as‘IMRD’ type reports. Without the investigation of pairs of texts across disciplines, wewould not have been able to support thedescription of genres across disciplines at the broad level wewere aiming for. The two together were, we believe, essential forthe robust identification of distinct genres with distinct educational purposes.

This illustrates how two different genre families were established based on interpretation of texts and assessmentpractices. The interaction of both sources of information was used to develop our classification of thirteen genre families, butdifferent features acquired significance in the process (Gardner & Nesi, in press; Nesi & Gardner, in press). For instance, animportant difference between Case Studies and Critiques is the presence or absence of a Recommendations for Future Actionstage; while it is the persuasive nature of the language throughout Proposals that evidences their social purpose incomparison to Design Specifications whose language is technical and directive.

Table 5Biology project and practical section headings.

N words % Project main headings Practical headings N words %

Abstract427 4 Introduction Introduction 118 13

Principles of an aquaponic system2146 20 Literature review (43 citations) 0 0

Objectives2456 24 Materials and Method (11 sections) Methods & Materials 116 123033 29 Results (7 sections) Results & Analysis (2 tables, 2 figures) 460 49

Discussion Discussion2408 23 Conclusion 241 26

Future Work10,470 100% 935 100%

References (50)Appendices (4)

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8. Contexts of situation and registers of student academic texts

While genres are staged, goal-oriented social processes, registers in SFL are configurations of field, tenor and mode.Halliday’s (1973) insight that the three functions of language – ideational, interpersonal and textual – are relevant to the threeaspects of context of situation – the Field, Tenor and Mode opened up the very productive field of register analysis, wheredifferences in contexts of situation are reflected in choices from specific linguistic systems, as will be illustrated below withthree ‘methods’ extracts. For instance, the technical/specialised vs everyday/commonsense aspect of field is realised in theprocesses, participants and circumstances used (e.g. is the text about ‘how much girls eat’ or about ‘eating behaviours’; is itabout human behaviour or chemical activity); the equal/unequal power relations of tenor are evidenced in mood andmodality selections (e.g. is the author writing as a student for a tutor, or a professional for a client); and in mode the languageof reflection or action role can be seen in theme, voice, and lexical density (see Halliday, 2009/1975, p. 58 and p. 64–65).

The design of the BAWE corpus lends itself to explorations of register variation as follows: Differences in field are evi-denced in comparisons across academic disciplines and disciplinary groups, which may be more concerned with individuals,groups, semiotic entities or physical entities as participants; differences in tenor are evidenced in comparisons across the fourlevels of study as students become increasingly expert in academic writing using, for instance, relatively more nominallanguage6; and differences in mode are evidenced in the relationship between written text and figures or tables in assign-ments. Thus for instance Explanation genres include three times7 as many figures than the average for assignments in theBAWE corpus. As the corpus files are tagged for genre family, discipline and level, differences in register can be readilyinvestigated.8

Although the BAWE corpus includes information about the writers and texts, it is important not to place undue weight onindividual features of the language or of the material situation. For example, corpus analysis can tell us that students withAsian first languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai) use the first person pronoun lemma ‘I’ significantly less often (8per 10,000 words) than students with English as their first language (13 per 10,000 words). Further investigation shows,however, that ‘I’ is most frequent in the humanities (30 per 10,000 words), where there are few Asian L1 students. Acomparison of students’ use of ‘I’ in Business and Economics, where there are many Asian L1 students, shows no significantdifference between Asian L1 (9 per 10K) and native speakers (10 per 10K). This is an interesting finding, and one supported byother studies (e.g. Nesi & Moreton, 2011), which suggests that generally the tenor of the writing does not point to the firstlanguage of the writers as a register feature, as it is not reflected in linguistic choices in the writing. This marks a clear partingof the ways between SFL and AcLits descriptions of context of situation. In ethnography rich descriptions of contexts wouldinclude features observed by the researcher or highlighted by participants (Lillis, 2008) whichmight include the first languageof writers, or whether experiments were being conducted in physical labs or in virtual labs using programmes such as MatLab.For SFL such details would not count as features of registers in the context of situation – anymore than the colour of the skin ofthe writer, or the make of computer used for writing – unless they were reflected in the linguistic choices of the writers.

To illustrate how linguistic features in texts construe their contexts of situation, three very short extracts have beenchosen, although analysis would normally involve full texts. The extracts are all from methods sections of experimentalreports and are presented here in fonts that preview the metafunctional analysis: small caps for ideational, italics forinterpersonal and bold for textual. As individual words may contribute to the ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings,only selectedmeanings have been indicated. (For example, ‘to determine’ does contribute to field, but I have foregrounded itstextual meaning – it is part of the grammatical Theme which sets up clear expectations for the organisation of the rest of theparagraph.)

Extract A

Method.Data AnalysisIn order to investigate whether SELF-ESTEEM LEVELS were lower and deviant EATING BEHAVIOURS were higher in FIRST YEAR

UNIVERSITY GIRLS than a CONTROL GROUP of NON UNIVERSITY GIRLS, BETWEEN SUBJECTS MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE (MANOVA) andPEARSON’S CORRELATION CO-EFFICIENT were used to analyse data.

6 Scores using Biber’s (1988) multidimensional analysis show significant differences between all four levels, from �13 at level 1, through �14, at level 2,�15 at level 3 and �17 at level 4 on dimension 1, suggesting a more informational register achieved through more nominal groups with nouns andprepositions (the x of y), longer words, and lower type token ratio.

7 Explanation assignments average 2000 words and three figures, compared to the BAWE corpus average of 2300 words and one figure.8 JEAP readers are invited to explore such differences across the corpus. The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus can be freely searched with

the corpus query tool SketchEngine, available at http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/open/. Registered users have increased functionality (e.g. key wordsearches). The corpus is also available for researcher purposes from the Oxford Text Archive: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/headers/2539.xml.

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–6360

Extract B

Method.2.3. Wordlist constructionTo determine how ADJECTIVES are used relating to the ENGLISH FOOTBALL TEAM I decided to first build a WORDLIST using CONCAP

for the BROADSHEET and ONLINE NEWS SERVICES SAMPLES as I felt thiswould allowme an overview to evaluatemy RESULTSwhichwouldin turn give me the opportunity to INVESTIGATE any interesting FEATURES.

Extract C

ExperimentalFOUR SETS OF BOILING TUBES were prepared as described below and placed in the THERMOSTAT to EQUILIBRIATE AT EACH TEMPERATURE.TUBE 1: 10 CM3 OF 0.01 M PHENOL, 10 CM3 OF THE BROMATE/BROMIDE SOLUTION (0.0833M BR AND 0.0167M BRO3), 4 DROPS OF METHYL RED

TUBE 2: 5 CM3 0.5 M H2SO4

SMALL CAPS font is used for linguistic features from the experiential systems that reflect the Field of the texts. A comparison ofparticipants (see ‘participant’ row in Table 6) shows A is about semiotic entities, B about personal characteristics and C aboutchemical entities. A and B report cognitive processes compared to C’s material processes. A uses circumstances of purpose, Bof purpose and location, while C uses purpose, location and manner. From this type of clause analysis, interpreted throughexperience of many similar texts, a picture of the semantic fields of each text emerges (Table 6). Thus even from these veryshort extracts, we can infer (>) that A is about the decisions made in a linguistic investigation of semiotic entities; B is aboutthe experimental design of an investigation of psychological properties in groups of people; and C is about the equilibriationof chemicals at different temperatures.

Italics is used for the interpersonal features that reflect the tenor and how the writer represents herself and construes heraudience. Table 6 shows that all texts are in declarative mood, with only A using first person I to mention herself, only A usingmodal verbs (would), and in appraisal resources, A using affect (interesting) where B uses judgement (deviant) and C usesmeasurement (four sets of). Also contributing to tenor is the technicality of the language. These features combine to construe Aas affectively involved, B as judgementally remote, and C as technically absent.

Differences inMode shown in bold reveal the denser language of Psychology reflected in the greater use of nominalisation,passive voice and embedding when compared with the less dense Awith its personal subjects and active voice, and with theless syntactically complex C with its alternation of full clauses and items listed as nominal groups (e.g. Tube 1:.). Extract Cbrings us closer to the material setting and physical events of the experiment; while Extract A brings us closer to the writer asan active participant.

We can see that all three involve reporting past activity; A and B include explanationwhich only A attempts to justify. Thissuggests differences within each discipline in terms of what can be assumed and what needs to be made explicit. It begins tosuggest differences in disciplinary culture. In A, methods are intuitive, individual, and the aim seems to be to try somethingand see if results are interesting. In B, methods are purposeful, but they are ‘given’ in that there is no need to justify them, andthe aim is to discover differences among groups. In C, the methods are described in specific detail and the aim is to see whatchemical reaction happens under the conditions specified.

The features listed in the left hand column of Table 6 are not random, but are expected to illuminate the Field, Tenor andMode of texts through systematic links to the choices in the lexicogrammar. SFL provides the theoretical framework and themetalanguage to enable us to talk specifically about the contrasts that emerge (e.g. between mental, cognitive and materialprocesses, or between affect, judgement and measurement) which are worth exploring throughout texts from thesedisciplines. Equally the similarities between the extracts (such as declarative mood and subordinate clauses of purpose)suggest features characteristic of the genre that help us to understand the language used in this ‘methods’ stage of thegenre.9

Such comparisons cannot simply be read from the extracts alone; connections need to be made with evidence fromother texts and their contexts, but they illustrate clearly the important linguistic evidence that can be found in texts howit construes the contexts of situation and culture, and what we can begin to infer about the broader disciplinaryideologies.

9 In some descriptions the methods stage might be treated as a recount genre itself, but as we are interested in assignment genres, and methods sectionsdo not appear as whole assignment texts in our corpus, it remains for us a stage in a larger genre. In some descriptions the methods stage might be treatedas a recount genre itself, but as we are interested in assignment genres, and methods sections do not appear as whole assignment texts in our corpus, itremains for us a stage in a larger genre.

Table 6Linguistic features construing field, tenor and mode.

Extract A Extract B Extract C

Features ExamplesEXPERIENTIAL > FieldSemantic fields ADJECTIVE, WORDLIST, > linguistics

CONCAP, > corpus linguisticsSAMPLES, RESULTS > empirical research

SELF-ESTEEM, BEHAVIOUR, > psychologyINVESTIGATE, CONTROL GROUP,ANALYSE > empirical researchBETWEEN SUBJECTS MULTIVARIATE,MANOVA > experimental design

BOILING, TUBES, THERMOSTAT > laboratoryBROMATE, HS04 > chemistryPREPARED, PLACED > experiment

Technicalvocabulary

Frequent 82%;Anglo-Saxon 69%

Frequent 72%Anglo-Saxon 61%

Frequent 90% (or 75%)Anglo-Saxon 61% (or 45%)

PARTICIPANTS Semiotic entities: ADJECTIVE, WORDLIST,BROADSHEET, ONLINE NEWS

Personal characteristics: SELF-ESTEEM LEVELS,DEVIANT EATING BEHAVIOURS

Statistical tests: BETWEEN SUBJECTS MULTIVARIATE

ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE (MANOVA), PEARSON’SCORRELATION CO-EFFICIENT

Quantities: 10 CM3, 4 DROPS OF..Chemical entities: M PHENOL, METHYL

PROCESSES Mental: cognitive processes DETERMINE,DECIDED, FELT, EVALUATE, INVESTIGATE

Cognitive/material processes: INVESTIGATE,ANALYSE

Material processes: PREPARED, PLACED

CIRCUMSTANCES Purpose: TO DETERMINE ., TO EVALUATE .,TO INVESTIGATE .

Purpose: IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE, TO ANALYSE.

Location: IN FIRST YEAR UNIVERSITY GIRLS

Purpose: TO EQUILIBRIATE

Location: BELOW, IN THE THERMOSTAT

Manner: AT EACH TEMPERATURE

Interpersonal > TenorMoodFirst personModalityAppraisal

Declarative > informingI, I, Me, My, meWould wouldAFFECT: Any interesting features

Declarative > informing–

–

JUDGEMENT: Deviant eating behaviour

Declarative > informing–

–

MEASUREMENT: Four sets ofTextual > ModeThemeSubject

Subordinate clause of purposePersonal pronoun – I

Subordinate clause of purposeNominalisation: Between subjectsmultivariate analysis of.co-efficient

¼ SubjectNominal group: Four sets ofboiling tubes

VoiceFinite verbsReference

Active5 finite and 6 non-finite verbscataphoric: this

Passive3 finite and 2 non-finite verbs-

Passive2 finite and 2 non-finite verbsanaphoric: below

Lexical densityType token ratio

Density¼ 0.53TTR 55/46¼ 0.84

Density: 0.67TTR 46/38¼ 0.83

Density: 0.5* (or 0.72)TTR 20/20*¼ 1.0 (or 53/34¼ 0.64)

KEY: SMALL CAPS – EXPERIENTIAL; Italics – Interpersonal; Bold – textual; *calculations based on first sentence, then in brackets for full text which includes a list.Linguistic features such as mood and theme are explained in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004). http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng used to calculate vocabularyfreq., TTR, and Lexical Density (which is content words/total words).

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–63 61

9. Conclusions and applications to EAP

SFL register and genre analysis provide bridges between features of texts and their contexts of use in that descriptions ofclusters of lexicogrammatical features around the three metafunctions construe specific meanings in their contexts ofsituation and of culture respectively. Arguments for the mutual benefits of ethnography and linguistic analysis are not new(Creese, 2008), and fall within the scope of linguistic ethnography (Rampton, 2007), but this paper has extended thesearguments to SFL genre and register analysis for EAP.

Four scenarios emerge. First, while insightful investigations of literacy practices exist, when these inform EAP pedagogy,descriptions of texts are also beneficial. SFL provides a compatible framework for this, leading to detailed, systematic andappliable findings.

Conversely, while analyses of the lexicogrammar of academic texts can be revealing, to use these in EAP teaching, we alsoneed an understanding of who employs which linguistic resources in which contexts and for which purposes with whateffect.

Thirdly, an ethnographic investigation of academic writing practices is essential if we, as researchers, are to developsufficient understanding of the stages and purposes of academic writing for genre description and classification. AcLitsprovides a compatible approach for investigating writing through literacy events and practices. Without developing an emic(participant) understanding of the complex educational and social purposes of academic writing for different stakeholderparticipants in specific disciplines, from student writers through to national subject boards, the genre analyst risks imposingclassifications from other contexts that are inadequate for the texts being described. In our project, the temptation to grouptogether all texts that have an IMRD structure as members of one genre was resisted in the light of information frommultipledata sources in the ethnographic investigation which was, crucially, reflected in the language of the text. In other words,investigations of academic literacy practices are necessary, but not sufficient for genre analysis. There must also be analysis ofthe texts themselves.

Finally, for register analysis, access to information about literacy events and practices in specific contexts of situation isrequired in order to fully interpret linguistic features of registers. Linguists can identify lexicogrammatical features that

S. Gardner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11 (2012) 52–6362

cluster in specific contexts, but in order to interpret these meaningfully, we need a broader understanding of events andpractices in these contexts. This was certainly our experience when confronting texts from unfamiliar disciplines. Forinstance, the analysis of appraisal features in the extracts suggests differences in disciplinary values which are worth furtherexploration. Conversely, we can start with features of the context, such as native versus non-native speakers, or first year vsthird year students, but without linguistic evidence to support differences, an SFL approach to register would not recognisethese features as significant, any more than the desk at which the paper was written. As with genre analysis, register analysisrequires investigation of both texts and practices to fully understand how meanings are construed in context.

The final constraints are often practical. There is much research to be done to develop our understanding of academicliteracy practices in context, just as there is much research to be done to develop our understanding of academic texts incontext. Through the genre and register analysis so essential for applications of such research to EAP contexts, there ispotential for AcLits and SFL not only to complement each other as suggested above, but also for each to trigger developmentsin the other, particularly given their shared heritage, and shared concern for empowering student writers.

The ethnographic investigations in our project were focused on the English national context, on texts and documentationfrom thirty disciplines, and on interviews from tutors and students at three universities at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury. Differences may emerge in consideration of additional disciplines, other national contexts, and different points intime. For instance, the influence of technology on communication practices may lead to increasingly multimodal texts whichreflect changing goals for university education.

It is also important to recognise, as the students interviewed do, that departments, or lecturers within a given department,may have different expectations of good writing. For instance, the personal nature of the language used in the corpuslinguistics extract was not universally valued.

No general description can account for all features of a specific assignment in context. Thus, in addition to finding outabout the genres produced in target departments, the EAP practitioner can use genre descriptions to raise awareness instudents. As a lecturer, I was often asked questions such as ‘is it okay to use first person I?’, ‘can we use headings?’ or ‘do youwant us to start with an abstract?’ which led to further explication of the genre expected for a particular assignment. Thecomparative registers suggested in the three extracts could also be used to heighten students’ awareness of how thedifferences in research practices and conceptions of empirical research are reflected in the language of the specific disciplines.

Acknowledgements

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and OxfordBrookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previouslycalled CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (WestminsterInstitute of Education, Oxford Brookes), as part of the project An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British HigherEducationwhich was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (project number RES-000-23-0800) from 2004 to2007.

Further information about the corpus, how to access it, and related research is found at www.coventry.ac.uk/BAWE

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Dr Sheena Gardner is an educational linguist and Head of Department of English and Languages at Coventry University. She has taught EAP and appliedEnglish linguistics internationally. Her research from a broadly systemic functional perspective has recently focused on assessed university student writing,and the discourse of multilingual primary classrooms.