CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW - 動機與策略對英文論文摘要之解釋性

The chapter first reviews previous research on genre theory of RAs and on the conceptualization of learning an RA genre as gaining an identity in a disciplinary community. Second, the chapter reviews motivation studies in both fields of L2 learning and educational psychology, including key covariates and mediators of motivation, so as to provide a theoretical background for hypothesizing the motivation effect on L2 graduate students’ RA-abstract writing. Third, the chapter proposes a motivated abstract-writing model (the MAW model) in question.

Genre theory of Research Articles (RAs)

General Background of Genre Analysis of RAs

Since Swales (1990) initiated the discussion of the genre of the research article, the topic of genre has been widely-researched in the field of English for specific

purposes (Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Hyland, 2000, 2004, Swales, 2004; Swales & Feak, 2009, 2010). Genre is often defined as staged, organized events of communication, articulated by a given discourse community to express rhetorical purposes typical of the

community practice, and is formulated as schematic structures to the members of the community (Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Swales, 1990, 2004). Swales’ (1990) and Bhatia’s (1993) studies on genre mostly focus on research articles (RAs), which present

considerable challenges to L2 graduate students given the technicality associated with the writing convention of the RA (Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1990). Writing RA requires condensed and effective representations of content, and thus imposes stricter

requirements on the production of schematic structures and linguistic realizations compared to other written genres. Swales’ (1990) and Bhatia’s (1993) studies on the genric structure of RAs have provided some pedagogical implications, leading to the

development of some important textbooks and instructional practices (e.g., Swales &

Feak, 2004, 2009).

With an attempt to shed more light on the RA pedagogy, particularly for L2 graduate students, a myriad of genre studies have followed Swales’ tradition by targeting RAs for functional and linguistic analysis (Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Dos Santos, 1996; Hancioglu, 2009; Hsieh & Liou, 2008; Huckin, 2001; Hyland, 2000; Lau, 2004;

Pho, 2008). In this extensive ongoing discussion on the RA genre, a general consensus has been reached on how the schematic structures of communication are sanctioned by a given disciplinary community. In particular, Swales (1990) clearly defined the concept of “discourse community” to provide a foundation for subsequent discussions of the RA genre (pp. 24-27). According to Swales (1990, pp 24-27), a discourse community:

Has a broadly agreed set of common public goals-- either implicit or tacit.

Has mechanisms for inter-communication among its members-- a crucial feature as members are to interact with each other.

Uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and

feedback-- membership that implies uptake of the group’s communication to exchange information.

Utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims-- The discourse members have certain expectations about the role of texts, their organization and their use.

Has acquired some specific lexis-- Uses everyday vocabulary in specialized ways or develops its own lexis and acronyms.

Has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise-- Imply mechanisms for changing memberships with a reasonable ration of experts to novices.

In Swale’s thinking, cognitively, L2 graduate students strive to acquire the schematic structures of RA writing in order to write RAs acceptable to a disciplinary community. The acceptability of RAs tends to be evaluated by the norms of RAs

writing established by a disciplinary community, such as specific lexis for the discipline and schematic structures of RAs. The schematic structures encompass a sequenced order of communicative events or rhetorical purposes, called moves or steps (sub-components of moves) by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). Moves may be obligatory or optional depending on the disciplinary norms of RAs writing. Moves in RAs may appear in different orders, be embedded in each other, and repeatedly appear.

Despite these minor idiosyncratic occurrences of moves, a typical schematic structure of moves can be identified in the typical practices of RAs recognized by a disciplinary community. In addition, moves in the schematic structure are usually realized by linguistic patterns conventionalized by the disciplinary community. In this sense, learning the schematic structures of RAs writing means to acquire the ability to use adequate moves in a sequence typical of the disciplinary practices, and the ability to compose the moves by the lexico-grammatical patterns disciplinarily conventionalized.

If L2 graduate students successfully learn a given schematic structure of RA writing, they will be able to write RAs acceptable to their chosen community by mapping functions of the typical moves onto forms of the conventionalized lexico-grammatical patterns.

As stated above, the cognitive demands of learning the RA genre are not only challenging but highly related to social practices of a chosen disciplinary community. A growing body of research has addressed the issues of how L2 graduate students can be socially motivated to learn the schematic structures through the disciplinary practices of RAs writing, and how they strive to gain a researcher identity in the community via producing RAs acceptable to the community (Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Chang & Kanno,

2010; Dos Santos, 1996; Flowerdew, 2000; Hancioglu, 2009; Hsieh & Liou, 2008;

Huckin, 2001; Huang, 2010; Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1990; Swales & Feak, 2004). In these studies, learning of RAs writing is often conceptualized as an

identity-development process in which L2 graduate students seek to achieve a future researcher identity as competent RA writers in their chosen communities (Chang &

Kanno, 2010; Flowerdew, 2000; Huang, 2010), who can write RAs conforming to their disciplinary practices. This RA writing ability makes L2 graduate students eligible to gain a legitimate identity in their disciplinary communities, suggesting their

qualification to actively engage in more community discussions in the future.

A number of recent studies have launched qualitative inquires into the

identity-development process of NNES researchers in academic practices. Flowerdew (2000) presented a case study on a NNES-researcher that sought for successful

publication by negotiating content and forms of his RA with journal editors and

reviewers. This negotiation process revealed the difficulties the NNES- researcher faced at the levels of subject-knowledge and language when seeking a legitimate identity in a disciplinary community via writing RA acceptable to that community. Likewise, Huang (2010) documented the language challenges that NNES PhD students in scientific disciplines face in the publication practices of RAs. These students perceived their English writing skills as limited for successful publications. However, they were not motivated to learn the writing skills because (a) they did not perceive English writing skills as important to their academic engagement; (b) they did not perceive writing instruction as effective; and (c) they perceived that their advisors mostly dominate the publication practices, giving them less control over the practices. Huang concluded that NNES PhD students may be motivated to write better research articles for more active participation in their disciplinary practices, if they (a) believe a better RA-writing ability as essential for their success in their disciplinary practices, (b) are

well-supported with development in subject knowledge and English language, and (c) are given more control over their practices of RA writing.

In a similar qualitative inquiry, Chang and Kanno (2010) highlighted the cross-disciplinary differences in the identity-development process by presenting the perspectives of PhD students and their advisors on the importance of English

proficiency to their discursively disciplinary practices. Despite being NNES with more language barriers in English use, the students demonstrated their ability to make best use of their cultural or technical capitals to gain a legitimate membership in their disciplinary communities. Yet across the three disciplines (engineering, economics, and Chinese), the importance of English proficiency to academic success was recognized to varying degrees, depending on disciplinary communities, community practices, and different community members. For engineering and economics, the PhD students perceived the community practices in their fields as more language-independent, although their advisors perceived English proficiency as a basic requirement for their community practices. For Chinese, both the PhD student and her advisor regarded their community practices as highly language-dependent due to the technical requirement in their subfield, linguistics. Apparently, NNES PhD students and their advisors perceived a varying degree of importance of English proficiency to students’ navigation in

academia.

In short, motivated L2 learning of RAs writing can be viewed as motivational striving to gain an identity as a legitimate researcher in a chosen disciplinary community, and as cognitive learning of the schematic structures of RAs.

Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts

Rhetorical moves and lexico-grammatical patterns. With respect to approaching RA writing convention, the abstract of an RA may be a reasonable place to

start. An abstract of RA is defined as a miniature in presenting the design and significance of the studies by highlighting aims and their conclusions (Dos Santos, 1996; Hyland, 2000). In discussing rhetorical purposes of an abstract, Swales and Feak (2009, 2010) cited Huckin’s (2001) definitions of abstract, and added a fifth purpose to make a list of rhetorical purposes of abstracts more comprehensive.

1. They function as stand-alone mini-texts, giving readers a short summary of a story’s topic, methodology, and main findings;

2. They function as screening devices, helping readers decide whether they wish to read the whole article or not;

3. They function as previews for readers intending to read the whole article, giving them a road-map for their reading;

4. They provide indexing help for professional abstract writers and editors;

5. They provide reviewers with an immediate oversight of the paper they have been asked to review.

To fulfill the rhetorical purposes, research abstracts are expected to have a clear information structure to present aim, method, results, and findings of the studies. The information structure of research abstracts has been systematically analyzed by “moves”

in the field of English for academic purposes (Hyland, 2000; Swales & Feak, 2004).

“Moves” in abstracts are defined as communicative acts deemed conventional in a given written discourse community, such as “moves” of stating research purpose, describing research methods, reporting results, and discussing research findings. Swales and Feak (2004) propose a coding scheme of moves to familiarize L2 graduate students with the information structure in research abstracts in Applied Linguistics, including moves of Background-Aim-Method-Results-Conclusion. In short, abstracts of RA should be written concisely and clearly enough to encapsulate the essence of an RA, including background, purpose, results, and conclusion of the study (Hsieh & Liou,

2008; Lau, 2004; Pho, 2008; Swales & Feak, 2009, 2010). Therefore, this study focuses on RA abstracts.

In line with the tradition of genre analysis, the genre analysis of RA abstracts started from analyzing the move structure (Dos Santos, 1996; Lau, 2004). Once the move structure was identified at the global level, a growing number of studies have continued the genre analysis by exploring how global move structures are realized by local structures, such as types of links between the first two sentences (Swales & Feak, 2010), and lexico-grammatical patterns (Hsieh & Liou, 2008; Pho, 2008; Hancioglu, 2009). Such patterns have been exemplified in the literature as follows: the purpose of the study aims to in the Aim move; the results show that in the Results move; the findings indicate that in the Conclusion move. Likewise, when outlining the contents of their textbook for instruction of abstract writing, Swales and Feak (2009, 2010) also state these two levels of abstract structure, namely global structure of rhetorical move, and local structure that includes “types of opening sentence, links between the first two sentences, the forms of purpose statement, and the construction of appropriate highlighting statements” (p 168). They further claim that analyzing abstracts from the global structure to the local reflects the learning trajectories from “analysis, to awareness, and to acquisition.” Therefore, analysis on these two levels of abstract structure may be further applied to evaluation of the quality of RA abstracts by developing two corresponding rating scales of RA abstracts.

Scoring rubric of RA abstracts writing. An increasingly growing body of studies on RA abstracts has revealed the importance of both global rhetorical moves and local lexico-grammatical patterns when evaluating the communicative effectiveness of an abstract (Dos Santos, 1996; Hsieh & Liou, 2008; Pho, 2008; Hancioglu, 2009;

Swales & Feak, 2004, 2009, 2010). Such evaluation of abstracts has been widely adopted in qualitative text-analysis (Hsieh & Liou, 2008; Pho, 2008; Hancioglu, 2009).

Yet, a rating scale that quantitatively evaluates RA abstracts in a standardized way has yet to be developed. To bridge this gap, the present study attempts to translate the two-level evaluation from the traditional qualitative analysis into a quantitative measure by developing two corresponding rating scales. The rating scales may serve as a tool to assess L2 graduate students’ writing ability of RA abstracts in a relatively standardized way. The rating scales will make possible ranking of the RA-abstract writing ability among a number of participants. This ability ranking then can be applied to quantitative studies that tend to show an overall learning pattern of a larger number of students, in contrast to qualitative inquiries that usually reveal idiosyncratic developments of a smaller number of students.

A similar thinking is evident in Stroller, Horn, Grabe, and Robinson’s (2005) development of a rating scale for chemistry reports of undergraduate writing. They organized a group of faculty members in applied linguistics and chemistry, who served in an expert panel to develop holistic and analytical rating scales. The expert panel defined meaningful criteria of the rating scales according to the norms of English-writing in general and chemistry discipline-based writing in particular. More specifically, the expert panel developed distinct score-points and score-descriptors for these two scales. Taking the analytical rating scale for example, a 6-point scale was assigned for rating, Score 6 showing the highest performance, Score 1 the lowest. In this scale, five aspects of writing are assessed, including organization, audience and purpose, writing conventions, grammar and mechanics, and science content.

Particularly for organization, they used rhetorical moves to describe the corresponding criteria on the 6-point scale, as shown below:

Score 6: All obligatory moves are present, fully developed, and in the correct order.

No extra moves are present.

Score 5: All obligatory moves are present, but one is out of sequence or has minor

problems. No extra moves are present.

Score 4: All obligatory moves are present, but a few have minor problems or are out of sequence. Extra moves may be present.

Score 3: One (sub)move is missing or underdeveloped. (Sub)moves may be out of sequence. Extra moves may be present.

Score 2: Two (sub)moves are missing or underdeveloped. (Sub)moves may be out of sequence. Extra moves may be present.

Score 1: Three (sub)moves are missing or underdeveloped. (Sub)moves may be out of sequence. Extra moves may be present.

Apparently, Stroller et al. (2005) demonstrated the feasibility of developing a rating scale that assesses the use of rhetorical moves in the writings of undergraduates majoring in chemistry in a quantitative and standardized manner. Stroller et al. (2005) also pointed out that applied linguists may perceive the scoring descriptors developed by chemistry experts as restrictive because the descriptors quantify the number of permissible mistakes on each score level. This quantifying description however reflects the disciplinary culture of chemistry, namely, being precisely accurate. Therefore, disciplinary culture needs to be considered when developing a rating scale with the content and descriptor on each score level specified.

Taking disciplinary culture into account, the present study will adopt Stroller et al’s practice to develop a scoring rubric for RA-abstract writing in applied linguistics.

Specifically, the present study will translate the global rhetorical moves and local lexico-grammatical patterns into two rating scales. These two scales have been recognized by many applied linguists as two major indicators for the quality of L2 graduate students’ RA-abstract writing ability (Hsieh & Liou, 2008; Liou, Yang, &

Chang, 2011; Swales & Feak, 2004; 2009; 2010).

L2 Motivation, Self-regulatory Strategies, Language Proficiency, and RA-abstract Writing Ability

This subsection reviews L2 motivation research with a focus on Gardner’s (1985, 2007) socio-educational model and Dörnyei’s (2006, 2009) responses to Gardner’s model. This subsection also reviews a modern expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983) so as to relate this motivation theory to motivated L2 learning. Particularly, the subsection highlights Eccles’ (2009) recent proposal that integrates the expectancy-value theory with the identity-based motivation theory (Oyserman, Terry,

& Bybee, 2002). And the subsection describes the application of Eccles’ (2009) proposal and Gardner’s model (2007) to the L2 motivation process in question that is termed as identity-based writing motivation. Finally, the subsection reviews studies that suggested associations among motivation, self-regulatory strategy use, language proficiency, and writing ability.

General Background of L2 Learning Motivation

In defining second language (L2) motivation, Gardner’s (1985) socio-educational model has been one of the most dominant theories over the past three decades (Csizér

& Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei, 2001, 2005; Huang, 2007; LoCastro, 2001; MacIntyre, 1994, 2002; Masgoret & Gardner, 2003; Oxford & Shearin, 1994; Yashima, Zenuk-Nishide,

& Shimizu, 2004). The socio-educational model is operationalized by Attitude Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) that assesses Attitudes toward the Learning Situation, integrativeness, Motivation, Language Anxiety, Instrumental Orientation, and Parental Encouragement (Gardner, 1985). At the heart of the AMTB, the Integrative Motive plays a central role in conceptualizing how and why L2 learners can be motivated by taking educational and cultural contexts into account. The Integrative Motive subsumes

three major variables: attitudes toward the learning situation, integrativeness, and motivation. Attitudes toward the learning situation refer to a learner’s evaluation of the educational context, such as a classroom setting, reflecting the importance of the cultural context in language learning, integrativeness reveals L2 learners’ willingness to obtain an identity for communicating with the target-language community. Motivation is defined as a combination of desire to learn, interest in the target language, and efforts at learning. Attitudes toward the learning situation and integrativeness act as two influential antecedents of motivation, and these three motivational factors interact with each other to influence the ultimate success of L2 learning.

However, the socio-educational model has received widespread criticisms due to its limited applicability to contexts of foreign language learning, and insufficient consideration of how the situation-specific factors may contribute to changes in L2 learning motivation (Dörnyei, 2001, 2002, 2005; MacIntyre, 2002; MacIntyre, et al., 2009; Oxford & Shearin, 1994). For example, the socio-educational model has been criticized for its relatively constrained perspective that mainly takes the context of learning French as a second language in Canada into account (MacIntyre, 2002;

Matthews, 2008, Dörnyei, 2002, 2005), making the model less applicable to other contexts of foreign language learning (MacIntyre, 2002; Oxford & Shearin, 1994). In addition, Dörnyei (2002, 2005) points out that Gardner’s (1985) model does not pay enough attention to how situation-specific learning may influence L2 learning motivation. Dörnyei (2002, 2005) thus calls for situating L2 learning motivation at a specific task to reflect the dynamic nature of learning process, in which motivation may fluctuate rather than stay stable throughout.

Relating Identity-based Writing Motivation to Their RA-abstract Writing Ability

The modern expectancy-value theory. Given the serious challenges to Gardner’s socio-educational model, a number of L2 motivation researchers tend to seek alternative solutions by examining to what extent key motivation constructs established in educational psychology can be applied to L2 studies, such as intrinsic motivation, achievement goals, and expectancy-value beliefs (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Dörnyei, 2001;

Eccles & Roeser, 2009; He, 2005; MacIntyre, 2002; Liem, Lau, & Nie, 2008; Mori, 2002; Mori & Gobel, 2006, Oxford & Shearin, 1994). The Expectancy-value theory, one of the most well-established motivation theories in educational psychology, has received increasing attention in L2 fields (Eccles & Roeser, 2009; Liem, et al., 2008;

Matthews, 2008; Mori, 2002; Mori & Gobel, 2006). The expectancy-value theory is composed of two major motivational beliefs: learners’ expectancy for success in achievement-related tasks, and their subjective value of task engagement (Bruinsma, 2004; Eccles, Adler, Futterman, Goff, Kaczala, & Meece, 1983; Eccles, & Wigfield,

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