基以體裁分析理論探究文學和電腦科學英文學術課堂中的語步與學科領域差異

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學文學院英語學系博士論文 Department of English, College of Liberal Arts. National Taiwan Normal University Doctoral Dissertation. 基以體裁分析理論探究文學和電腦科學英文學術課堂中的語步與學科領域差異 A Genre Analysis of Academic Lectures of Literature and Computer Science: Rhetorical Move Structures and Disciplinary Variations 劉貞妤 Liu, Chen-Yu 指導教授 Advisor: 陳浩然博士. 中華民國 109 年 6 月 June 2020.

(2) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor Professor Hao-Jan Chen for his dedicated support and guidance. Professor Chen continuously provided encouragement and was always willing and enthusiastic to assist in any way he could throughout the process. I could not thank him enough for his valuable advice and unrelenting support. Without his persistent help, the dissertation would not have been possible. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to my committee members, Professor Chih-Cheng Lin, Professor Peichin Chang, Professor Hsueh-Ying Yu, and Professor Shu-Li Lai for providing advice regarding the research. Many thanks to their practical suggestions and invaluable insight into my dissertation. Thanks should also go to my fellow PhD comrades, in particular Glory and Aaron, for their helpfulness and inspiration. I would like to thank them for listening, offering me advice, and supporting me through this entire process. Finally, nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of this degree than the members of my family. They kept me going on and this journey would not have been possible without their constant love and support. Most importantly, I wish to thank my loving and caring husband, Jie-Fan, for his unconditional inspiration and support. i.

(3) 摘要. 過往研究表明，關於學術課堂中語步結構的知識可以促進學生對學術課堂內容的理解。然而仍有一些問題尚待解決，如：過去分析的學術課堂和講課教師數量有限、前人研究僅針對某些課堂階段進行分析而沒有完整探究課堂的整體語步結構、且並未探討課堂的語步結構是否存有學科上的差異。為了解決這些問題並拓展現階段對學術課堂體裁的理解，本研究基以自耶魯大學和麻省理工學院開放式課程所收集的學術課堂逐字稿與課堂錄影，對學術課堂的整體語步結構進行更廣泛的分析。為了探討學術課堂中的語步結構是否存在著學科差異，本研究亦針對文學課堂和電腦科學課堂的語步結構進行比較。此外，考慮到詞串在組織學術課堂言談中的重要性，因此本研究欲分別找出學術課堂中各個階段的詞串，並分析它們是如何幫助構建學術課堂中不同階段的言談目的。根據所收集的學術課堂資料，本研究提出了一個包含二十一個語步和二十三個步驟的語步框架。其中，課堂導論階段包含了五個語步和十一個步驟；課堂主體階段包含了十三個語步和七個步驟；而課堂總結階段則包含了三個語步和五個步驟。據此框架，本研究分別找出了文學和電腦科學課堂的語步結構並進行比較。比較發現：(1) 兩個學科在課堂中採用了不同數量的語步及步驟，又以文學課堂使用了更多的語步而電腦科學課堂使用了更多的步驟；(2) 約有百分之二十的語步為個別學科特有，這些語步也進一步反映出個别學科的特色：文學課堂特有的語步類別反映了該學科以文本闡釋為核心的特質，而電腦科學課堂 ii.

(4) 特有的語步類別則反映了該學科以應用和問題解決為本的特質；(3) 在兩個學科共有的語步類別中，約有五分之一的共有語步有常規性的差異，說明兩個學科在採用個別語步時有不同的偏好。比較結果進一步凸顯了電腦科學領域的講師在課堂導論階段習慣援引先前課堂討論過的內容，而文學領域的講師在課堂總結階段則傾向於強調後續課程的計劃。這些研究結果證實，學術課堂中的語步結構確實存在著學科差異。此外，通過對不同課堂階段中的詞串作用探究，本研究發現有些詞串特別與某些語步或課堂階段有關，而詞串的功能也能反映出不同課堂階段的交際目的，如：在課堂導論階段的詞串多與組織課堂結構和表明教師意圖等目的的語步有關，而在課堂主體階段出現的詞串則較少有組織課堂結構的功能，而是多具有立場表達和指涉的功能。本研究結果亦針對學術英文教學與師資培育提出教學建議。本研究所提出的語步框架和學科特有的語步可用以輔助修習學術英語學生對學術課堂的理解能力，並增進他們對學術課堂體裁和學科差異的認知。此語步框架也可提供給非母語教師和新手教師，幫助他們更加了解學術課堂是如何以語步構建的，進一步做為輔助教師備課之參考。. 關鍵詞：學術課堂、語步分析、學科差異、詞串. iii.

(5) ABSTRACT. Past research has indicated that the knowledge concerning the rhetorical move structure of lectures can facilitate non-native students’ lecture comprehension. However, issues remain to be addressed, including the limited number of lectures and lecturers analyzed, the restricted focus on certain lecture phases without exploring the entire move structure of lectures, and the underexplored issue of the potential influence of discipline on move structure of lectures. To address these issues and expand the current understanding of lecture genre, this study analyzes the entire move structure of lectures drawing on lecture data from Open Yale Courses and MIT Open Courseware. To explore whether there are disciplinary variations in terms of move structures of lectures, this study further compares the move structures of literature lectures and computer science lectures. Moreover, considered the essential role of lexical bundles in structuring lecture discourse, this study also investigates the frequent lexical bundles in different lecture phases to explore how they help structure the discourse in different lecture phases. The current analysis results in a move framework of lectures consisting of twenty-one moves and twenty-three steps, with five moves and eleven steps identified in the beginning phase, thirteen moves and seven steps identified in the main body phase, and three moves and five steps identified in the ending phase. Based on the move framework, the respective move iv.

(6) structures of literature lectures and computer science lectures are also generated and compared. The comparison reveals that: (i) the two disciplines employ different numbers of moves and steps in lectures, with more moves employed in literature lectures and more steps employed in computer science lectures; (ii) around twenty percent of the moves are discipline-specific, with moves typical to literature reflecting its interpretive nature while moves specific to computer science reflecting its applied and problem-solving orientation; (iii) among the move categories shared by the two disciplines, the conventionality of around one-fifth of them are different, suggesting the different preferences between the two disciplines in employing individual moves. The comparison further highlights computer science lecturers’ conventional move to refer to contents discussed previously in the beginning phase, and literature lecturers’ tendency of highlighting plans of future lessons in the ending phase. These findings confirm that there are indeed disciplinary variations in terms of move structures of lectures. Moreover, the exploration of lexical bundles in different lecture phases reveals that some lexical bundles are especially associated with certain moves or phases. Particularly, lexical bundles in the beginning phase are mostly related to moves realizing purposes of organizing structures and expressing intentions, while those identified in the main body phase seldom serve a discourse-organizing function, but primarily perform stance and referential functions. These findings have v.

(7) implications for EAP teaching and learning, and teacher education. The proposed move framework and the discipline-specific moves may help improve EAP students’ lecture comprehension, and their awareness of lecture genre and potential disciplinary differences. The framework may also inform non-native and novice lecturers regarding how lectures are rhetorically structured, further supporting their lesson planning.. Keywords: academic lectures, rhetorical move analysis, disciplinary variations, lexical bundles. vi.

(8) TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................... 1. 1.1 Background .......................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Purpose of the study ............................................................................................. 4 1.3 Significance of the study ...................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................ 12 2.1 Studies on academic lectures.............................................................................. 13 2.1.1 Overview of the academic lecture genre ..................................................... 13 2.1.2 Overall organization of academic lectures .................................................. 16 2.1.3 Discourse-structuring lexical features of academic lectures ....................... 23 2.1.4 Disciplinary differences of academic lectures ............................................. 29 2.1.5 Summary...................................................................................................... 31 2.2 Rhetorical Move Structure Analysis .................................................................. 34 2.2.1 Genre and rhetorical moves ......................................................................... 34 2.2.2 Rhetorical move structure analyses of academic genres ............................. 39 2.2.2.1 Rhetorical move structure analyses of academic written genres ......... 39 2.2.2.2 Rhetorical move structure analyses of academic lectures .................... 43 2.2.3 Summary...................................................................................................... 57 2.3 The Present Study............................................................................................... 60 CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY .................................................................. 67 3.1 Description of corpora ........................................................................................ 68 3.2 Data Analysis ..................................................................................................... 80 3.2.1 Analysis of rhetorical move structure of academic lectures ........................ 81 3.2.2 Analysis of frequent lexical bundles of academic lectures .......................... 96 CHAPTER FOUR. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .............................................. 100. 4.1 Move and step categories in academic lectures ............................................... 101 4.1.1 Move and step categories in the beginning phase ..................................... 102 4.1.2 Move and step categories in the main body phase .................................... 116 4.1.3 Move and Step Categories in the Ending Phase ........................................ 138 4.1.4 Summary.................................................................................................... 146 vii.

(9) 4.2 Move structures of literature lectures and computer science lectures and disciplinary variations ............................................................................................ 159 4.2.1 Move Structure of Literature Lectures ...................................................... 159 4.2.2 Move Structure of Computer Science Lectures ......................................... 170 4.2.3 Comparison of move structures of literature and computer science lectures ............................................................................................................................ 184 4.2.4 Summary.................................................................................................... 213 4.3 Frequent Lexical Bundles in Different Lecture Phases .................................... 219 4.3.1 Frequent Lexical Bundles in the Beginning Phase .................................... 220 4.3.2 Frequent Lexical Bundles in the Main Body Phase .................................. 223 4.3.3 Frequent Lexical Bundles in the Ending Phase ......................................... 227 4.3.4 Summary.................................................................................................... 228 CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION .......................................................................... 233 5.1 Summary of Major Findings ............................................................................ 233 5.2 Implications of the Study ................................................................................. 242 5.2.1 Implications for Genre Studies .................................................................. 242 5.2.2 Implications for Lexical Studies ................................................................ 246 5.2.3 Implications for EAP Teaching and Learning ........................................... 247 5.2.4 Implications for Teacher Education .......................................................... 250 5.3 Limitations and Future Research...................................................................... 251 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 256 APPENDICES ........................................................................................................... 275. viii.

(10) LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Summarization of the rhetorical move structure frameworks proposed by previous studies (Cheng, 2012; Lee, 2009; Samraj & Petrovic, 2015; Thompson, 1994) .................................................................................................................... 55 Table 2. Description of the corpora .............................................................................. 77 Table 3. The move framework as the coding protocol of the current study ................ 90 Table 4. Summary of the corpora of the three lecture phases ...................................... 98 Table 5. Move structure of the beginning phase based on the current lecture data ... 103 Table 6. Move structure of the main body phase based on the current lecture data .. 117 Table 7. Move structure of the ending phase based on the current lecture data ........ 139 Table 8. The comparison between the move frameworks identified in the previous studies (Cheng, 2012; Lee, 2009; Samraj & Petrovic, 2015; Thompson, 1994) and in the current study ...................................................................................... 148 Table 9. The move structure of the beginning phase of literature lectures ................ 160 Table 10. The move structure of the main body phase of literature lectures ............. 164 Table 11. The move structure of the ending phase of literature lectures ................... 168 Table 12. The move structure of the beginning phase of computer science lectures . 171 Table 13. The move structure of the main body phase of computer science lectures 174 Table 14. The move structure of the ending phase of computer science lectures ...... 182 Table 15. Comparison of the move and step categories identified in the beginning phase of computer science and literature lectures.............................................. 185 Table 16. Summary of the conventionality of moves/steps in the beginning phase of computer science and literature lectures ............................................................ 186 Table 17. Comparison of the move and step categories identified in the main body phase of computer and literature lectures. ......................................................... 195 Table 18. Summary of conventionality of moves/steps in the main body phase of computer science and literature lectures ............................................................ 196 Table 19. Comparison of the move and step categories identified in the ending phase of computer and literature lectures. ................................................................... 208 Table 20. Summary of conventionality of moves/steps in the ending phase of computer science and literature lectures ............................................................ 209 Table 21. Lexical bundles in the beginning phase ..................................................... 220 Table 22. Lexical bundles in the main body phase .................................................... 224. ix.

(11) LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. An example of annotating moves/steps in MS Word ................................... 87 Figure 2. An example of lecturer referring to/reading the text .................................. 132 Figure 3. An example of lecturer demonstrating the process of deriving an equation ............................................................................................................................ 179 Figure 4. An example of lecturer demonstrating the coding process on the blackboard ............................................................................................................................ 181 Figure 5. An example of lecturer demonstrating the coding process on the laptop ... 181. x.

(12) CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background With a growing number of non-native students attending courses in universities in English-speaking countries, many students are taking intensive English courses to improve their language skills for a variety of university settings. (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997). Among various university genres, the genre of academic lectures plays a crucial role in non-native students’ academic success (Cheng, 2012; Olsen & Huckin, 1990), because it is a primary genre of instruction and an important channel for students to acquire discipline-related knowledge as well as other class-related matters (Ellington, 2000; Flowerdew, 1994; Flower & Miller, 1997; Suviniitty, 2010; Thompson, 1994; Young, 1990, 1994). However, as suggested by previous studies (Olsen & Huskin, 1990; Thompson, 1994; Lee, 2009), lecture comprehension remains an obstacle for many non-native students, regardless of proficiency level. Although most studies on lecture comprehension focus on the difficulties non-native students are facing, some researchers (Barr, 1990; Lee, 2009) have indicated that delivering lectures is also a very challenging task to non-native and novice lecturers. Past research (Chaudron & Richards, 1986; Flowerdew & Miller, 1997) has 1.

(13) revealed the positive effect of discourse structuring devices on lecture comprehension, such as macro-markers (e.g., what I’m going to talk about today) and discourse markers (e.g., so, okay). Among them, lexical bundles have been one of the key research focuses because of their discourse-organizing role of structuring academic lectures as well as the many other functions they could perform. On researching how academic lectures are structured from a more global level, rhetorical move structure has also been found to play an essential role in non-native students’ lecture comprehension. Although the analysis of rhetorical move structure is commonly adopted to describe text organization of research papers following Swales’ tradition (1981, 1990), the research tradition has later been adapted to research academic lectures as well (e.g., Lee, 2009; Samraj & Petrovic, 2015; Thompson, 1994). Previous finding has suggested that move structure of academic lectures could provide “as accurate a model of lecture as possible” (Samraj & Petrovic, 2015, p. 94), thus facilitating students’ lecture comprehension and relevant listening skills. Different lecture phases (e.g., introduction, closing) have also been found to consist of “a series of rhetorical strategies instructors employ to explicitly create a coherent discourse”, which provide listeners with “a cognitive road map for navigating lectures” (Lee, 2016, p. 100). As indicated by previous studies on academic lectures 2.

(14) (Thompson, 1994, 2003; Young, 1994), it is essential that students can successfully create mental maps to help process the information delivered to comprehend a lecture. Rhetorical move structure of academic lectures thus serves an important role in guiding students through academic lectures and facilitating lecture comprehension. Despite the important role of rhetorical move structure on lecture comprehension, only a handful of studies have investigated it (e.g., Thompson, 1994; Lee, 2009, Cheng, 2012; Petrovic & Samraj, 2015). Although the existing studies have contributed greatly to expand our understanding on the topic, there are still issues that remain to be further addressed, including the limited move analyses on certain phases, the underexplored issue regarding the potential disciplinary variations of move structures, and the restricted number of lectures analyzed. The current study thus aims to address these issues by analyzing the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures in their entirety based on a larger number of lectures from different disciplines. Also, as knowledge of a genre needs “to be supplemented by a knowledge of the specific language associated with each move” (Henry & Rosenberry, 2001b, p. 155), this study also aims to identify the frequent lexical bundles in academic lectures and explore their roles in structuring different lecture phases. This study has the potential to expand the current understanding of the lecture 3.

(15) genre in terms of its move structure and the frequent lexical bundles in different phases. The findings are also expected to shed light on EAP teaching and learning, and teacher education, because the proposed move structure could serve as supplementary materials to facilitate EAP learners’ lecture comprehension. The comparison of move structures between different disciplinary lectures could also provide pedagogical suggestions to EAP teachers in terms of whether a disciplinespecific instructions regarding move structure in lectures should be provided. Moreover, the proposed move structure can provide a useful outline for novice or non-native lecturers to structure lectures. 1.2 Purpose of the study The purpose of this study is to expand the current understanding of academic lectures and to address the gaps in previous studies by investigating the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures in their entirety and exploring whether there are disciplinary variations in terms of rhetorical move structures in lectures, focusing on those in the disciplines of literature and computer science. Previous cross-comparison studies focusing on disciplinary variations usually start with comparing disciplines between hard sciences and soft sciences, such as the investigation of the use of lexical bundles between history (soft sciences) and biology (hard sciences) (Cortes, 2004), and the functional language use across physics (hard sciences), chemistry (hard 4.

(16) sciences), and English (soft sciences) (Cotos & Chung, 2019). Cross comparisons between hard- and soft-science disciplines are usually conducted first to make sure there are indeed disciplinary differences, before researchers move on to explore differences among sub-disciplines. Given that disciplinary variations in terms of move structures of academic lectures are rather underexplored, this preliminary exploration thus mainly focuses on determining whether there are disciplinary variations between the two main scientific fields (i.e., hard sciences and soft sciences) in terms of move structures. In this light, the lectures of literature and computer science are selected, representing two broad scientific fields respectively, for the current exploratory comparison. Such exploration may help illuminate the extent of diversity among different disciplines in terms of move structures of the lecture genre. In addition to investigating the lecture genre from a rhetorical perspective, this study also explores its linguistic features from a bottom-up perspective, specifically the frequent lexical bundles. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of lexical bundles in structuring the lecture genre, connecting linguistic structures with move structure of academic genres, and describing disciplinary variations in academic genres. Lexical bundles are also found to be facilitative of students’ comprehension of discourse. It is therefore essential to identify the frequent lexical bundles appearing in academic lectures and investigate how they help structure and characterize the lecture 5.

(17) discourse in different phases. This study combines a focused Swalesian rhetorical move analysis and a corpusbased discourse analysis to extensively examine the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures in their entirety without limited to certain part-genres, as well as to explore the frequent lexical bundles that help characterize academic lectures as a genre and the way in which these lexical bundles structure the discourse in different phases of academic lectures. To be more specific, this study seeks to answer the following three research questions: 1. What are the rhetorical move structures of academic lectures in the disciplines of literature and computer science? 2. Are there disciplinary variations between the literature lectures and the computer science lectures in terms of their rhetorical move structures? 3. What are the frequent lexical bundles in different phases of academic lectures? How do they function to structure each phase? 1.3 Significance of the study The significance of the current study is the contributions it can potentially make to the fields of applied linguistics and English teaching and learning, particularly to the areas of genre studies, lexical studies, EAP instruction, and L2 teacher education. This study has the potential to make contributions to the field of genre studies in 6.

(18) several aspects. First of all, a relatively small number of genre studies have been conducted to explore spoken genres, compared to those investigating written genres. Several researchers have called for more research on spoken genres (e.g., Flowerdew, 1994; Hyland, 2002), admitting that there is a “relative paucity of work on spoken genres” (Hyland, 2002, p. 117). As this study focuses on analyzing the genre of academic lectures, this study thus has the potential to expand the current understanding of spoken academic genres and demonstrate how this type of genre can be characterized from a genre-oriented perspective. Since this study aims to explore the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures in their entirety, instead of only focusing on specific phases as most of the previous studies have done, the study thus has the potential to provide a comprehensive framework of move structure of academic lectures for further examination of lectures of other disciplines and to be used for developing pedagogical materials. This study also has the potential to contribute to lexical studies, specifically furthering the current understanding of the lexico-grammatical role of lexical bundles in shaping the rhetorical move structure of the lecture genre. Previous studies (e.g., Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004) have found that there is an abundance of lexical bundles frequently occurring in academic lectures and they perform various functions to structure the lecture discourse. Considering their 7.

(19) important role in structuring the discourse of this genre, one of the purposes of this study is thus to identify the frequent lexical bundles appearing in different phases of academic lectures to explore how they help to structure the lecture discourse. The identification of such lexical bundles and their locations in academic lectures of this study thus has the potential to increase the current understanding of the relationship between the typical lexico-grammatical features and the rhetorical move structures of academic lectures. Such investigation may demonstrate a broader picture regarding how academic lectures are developed with which frequent lexical elements. Also, this study could potentially provide pedagogical implications to EAP instruction. The analysis of the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures may be helpful for academically-oriented non-native students who need to improve their comprehension of lectures delivered in English, especially those in English-speaking countries, since understanding such structure could help them construct a mental map and become aware of the explicit rhetorical strategies lecturers utilize to structure their lectures. This, in turn, could facilitate students’ comprehension of lectures. This study thus may have the potential to provide pedagogical implications regarding improving non-native students’ comprehension of lectures and better prepare them for lectures delivered in English. In addition to EAP students, this study may also provide valuable implications 8.

(20) for L2 teacher education or for teacher training of novice teachers. Generally, teachers need to deliver discipline-related content knowledge in lectures while making sure the coherence of the information delivered, to create “a structured sequence of utterances which must help the listener to create a coherent mental representation of what [they are] trying to say” (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 17). Although teachers are generally wellprepared before lecturing, it is inevitable that a certain amount of fresh talk and online-editing would take place in academic lectures (Thompson, 1994). Although there have been more teacher training programs, such as the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program in the US offering doctoral students trainings regarding the responsibilities of a faculty member would need to take in universities including teaching (Seidel & Gaff, 2006), and the training programs for the growing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) (Gorsuch, 2006), lecturers in universities usually do not receive any training regarding how to lecture (Barr, 1990, Morell, 2007; Thompson, 1994). They may “only pick up the discursive conventions of lectures incidentally through countless hours of observing and evaluating other lecturers” (Lee, 2009, p. 53). Thus, as Barr (1990) indicated, it should not be too surprising to find out that some university lectures “are not good at lecturing” (p. 21), because no such training is offered. This study may provide a helpful framework of academic lectures for the training of L2 teachers, ITAs, and novice teachers in terms 9.

(21) of how they could structure their lectures. With the potential help of the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures and the frequent lexical bundles in different phases, the prospective teachers at universities in English-speaking countries are likely to plan their lectures more effectively and confidently without entirely depending on their own experiences of observing courses and guessing the discourse conventions of lectures (Lee, 2009). Moreover, since the study also aims to explore disciplinary variations in terms of rhetorical move structures of academic lectures, such analysis could also provide suggestions for both EAP instruction and L2 teacher education. This study may provide insights into whether the instruction regarding rhetorical move structure of academic lectures should vary according to EAP students’ different disciplinary fields, or whether novice or L2 teachers from different disciplinary fields should be trained differently in order to deliver their lectures in ways that meet the conventions of their own disciplinary communities. Collectively, this study may provide a clearer view in terms of what rhetorical moves consist the lecture genre, whether there are disciplinary variations in terms of move structure, what frequent lexical bundles are there in the lecture genre and how they function to structure the discourse and characterize such genre. Although this study is a preliminary research on the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures, 10.

(22) it has the potential to provide future studies a framework for further analyses on both linguistic and structural features of academic lectures.. 11.

(23) CHAPTER TWO. LITERATURE REVIEW This research aims to explore the genre of academic lectures by analyzing the rhetorical move structure in lectures of literature and computer science, and identify frequent lexical bundles in different phases of academic lectures to expand the current understanding of academic lectures from a genre-oriented perspective. Past studies on academic lectures, especially those related to how they are organized, should be reviewed in order to show the current findings and identify the issues that should be addressed further. This chapter consists of two sections. The first section provides a brief overview of the lecture genre and discusses the obstacle in terms of lecture comprehension faced by non-native students and non-native and novice lecturers’ challenge in terms of lecture delivery. This section also reviews studies investigating academic lectures concerning the ways they are organized and the relationship between lecture organization and lecture comprehension. The primary intention is to provide a general picture regarding what is known in terms of the structure of academic lectures and discuss the essential lexical components that help structure lecture discourse and may have essential impact on lecture comprehension of non-native students. The second section of this chapter provides a detailed description of the analysis 12.

(24) of rhetorical move structure, including its research origin, its key elements, and how a rhetorical move analysis is conducted. After the general information regarding the analysis is introduced, the section then reviews studies applying the analysis for investigating different genres. Insights drawn from such analysis are also discussed. Then, previous research on the rhetorical move structure of academic lectures is also reviewed. The intention of this section is mainly to provide the details of the analysis of rhetorical move structure, as well as to show how much is known in terms of such structure of academic lectures, and what should be further investigated in order to increase the current understanding of how academic lectures are rhetorically organized. 2.1 Studies on academic lectures 2.1.1 Overview of the academic lecture genre Similar to other academic genres, such as textbooks and tutorials, the main purpose of academic lectures is to deliver subject-related content knowledge, thus a pedagogical process genre in essence (Thompson, 1994). That is, the main functions of academic lectures include, but are not limited to, introducing key theories of certain disciplines, explaining complex concepts, elaborating constructs by providing examples, offering information additional to contents presented in current materials, integrating ideas from previous lectures to current lectures, and providing critical 13.

(25) evaluation of materials or research (Dudley-Evans & Johns, 1981; Young, 1990, 1994; Thompson, 1994). Despite sharing a similar goal with other academic genres to pass on a sequence of information regarding certain disciplines or subject matters to students, academic lectures are more than a genre that merely delivers information (Thompson, 1994). In a lecture, a lecturer’s role not only concerns offering usually lengthy monologue presenting discipline-relevant facts, but also involves evaluating “the information, methods and procedures…in terms of their validity, appropriacy, and so on” on a moment-by-moment basis (Dudley-Evans & Johns, 1981, p. 32). Furthermore, lecture monologue is considered an interplay of the three elements of “informing, evaluating and organizing” (Thompson, 1994, p. 172), a metalanguage providing content knowledge, lecturers’ personal insights, and the organization of the lecture to the audience. Given the nature of such genre, giving an effective and clear lecture monologue is in fact a very challenging task for lecturers. They are expected to be able to present and evaluate information “in a sequentially structured manner” (Lee, 2009, p. 43), so the audience will be able to construct a “coherent mental representation” based on their monologues (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 17). It is reasonable to believe that such task poses even greater difficulties to non-native lecturers, considering that they 14.

(26) would need to overcome the language barrier and at the same time make sure that the delivery is informative, understandable, and well-structured so students can follow the lecture content. In addition to the great challenges that lecturers are experiencing in the lecture genre both linguistically and cognitively, such genre also presents great difficulties for students as well (Lee, 2009). As Rost (1994) indicated, “It is misleading to assume that the lecturer ‘packs’ the lecture with information and the listener ‘unpacks’ it in a complementary fashion.” (p. 93). Instead, students have to process the language input while making sense of the often lengthy monologues in lectures (Thompson, 2003). Furthermore, they also need to “actively construct a coherent interpretation of what is probably a complex and cognitively demanding spoken message” (Thompson, 1994, p. 172), in order to successfully comprehend the information delivered in a lecture. This is particularly challenging to non-native students due to the great processing burden imposed by academic lectures which is both linguistically and cognitively demanding (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997). Even non-native students with adequate English proficiency may still find such task very difficult (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Thompson, 1994; Young, 1994). However, unable to follow lecture contents and falling to grab crucial information in lectures may result in students’ failure in constructing a mental modal (Thompson, 1994). This could prevent them from 15.

(27) connecting ideas and organizing information, thus affecting the overall comprehension of the lecture. Considering the significant role of lectures in students’ academic success, it is thus essential to improve their abilities to comprehend lectures. The internationalization of university education has contributed to the strong need for non-native teachers to deliver lectures in English and for non-native students to understand lecturers in English as well. Therefore, English courses that are tailored to meet their specific communicative needs in academic lectures should be quite beneficial (Deroey & Taverniers, 2012). Because of the continuing importance of the lecture genre in university settings and the increasing number of foreign teachers and ITAs delivering courses, and non-native students entering universities in Englishspeaking countries, there have been many studies investigating the genre of academic lectures from a variety of perspectives. Since the goal of this study is to explore the organization of academic lectures and the potential disciplinary variations across lectures in terms of their rhetorical move structures, the following literature review sections would focus particularly on studies with these two foci. 2.1.2 Overall organization of academic lectures Although lecture discourse is not as strictly planned as academic written discourse and is rather spontaneous due to its real-time nature, such discourse is still usually planned and more organized than other spoken discourse types such as casual 16.

(28) conversation (Flowerdew & Tauroza, 1995). Swales (2001) also argued that university lectures are “heavily signaled and signposted” (p. 35), considering that “lecturers tend to explicitly structure the organization of classroom discourse and highlight the relationship between ideas presented” (Lee & Subtirelu, 2015, p. 53). Previous studies have indicated the crucial role lecture structures play in L2 students’ lecture comprehension (Breen, 2001; Lee & Subtirelu, 2015), since learners have to find their ways to navigate through a lecture “by identifying the textual cues which signal a transition from one kind of talk to another …if they are to find their way through it in order to make sense of it” (Breen, 2001, pp. 311-312). Many researchers have therefore explored lectures by investigating how they are structured or by identifying lexical elements that could serve as cues signaling the structures of the discourse. The importance of discourse structure to lecture comprehension has long been established. For example, Olsen and Huckin (1990) found that in engineering lectures some L2 students “may understand all the words in a lecture (including lexical connectives and other discourse markers) and yet fail to understand the lecture’s main points or logical argument” (p. 33). This highlighted L2 students’ inability to recognize main points in a lecture (Chiang & Dunkel, 1992). According to Olsen and Huckin (1990), those L2 students who failed to comprehend the lecture simply took 17.

(29) an “information-driven” strategy in comprehending the lecture. That is, they only aimed to retrieve information or facts from the lecture, without trying to recognize the more complex discourse structure underlying with speakers’ intentions. However, those L2 students who successfully comprehended the lecture took a “point-driven” strategy, as they tried to “see the discourse as having a single overriding main point and a number of subordinate points supporting it” (p. 41). The researchers thus suggested that L2 students should be taught to “listen to lectures in a more rhetorical, strategic way” (p. 33). In addition, they noted that the strategies taken by students is probably influenced by “a kind of disciplinary ‘cultural’ conditioning tied to method of science and engineering instruction” (p. 44). That is, L2 students not only should be taught strategies for lecture comprehension, but also should be aware of how the lectures in their own disciplines are conventionally structured, since disciplinary culture may to some extent affect how one lecture develops. According to Olsen and Huckin (1990), students on engineering courses seemed to be relatively familiar with the lectures that were structured mainly based on descriptions of a series of facts and situations. Based on the finding, Tauroza and Allison (1994) therefore supposed that students on engineering courses would experience problems when trying to comprehend lectures with a more elaborated structure different from a conventional one. To examine their proposition, Tauroza and 18.

(30) Allison conducted a study to see whether students would detect the main points in a lecture following a more elaborate structure of problem-solution discourse: situationproblem-solution-evaluation. They found that most students failed to capture the main ideas in the lecture, and some students even misinterpreted some key ideas. The researchers thus argued that students should become familiar with the discourse structures of different types of academic lectures. More importantly, students should also be taught how to recognize the discourse structure of a lecture on their own so it will be easier for them to distinguish the type of academic lectures they are dealing with. More extensively, Young (1994) proposed a comprehensive framework to describe the macro-structure and micro-features of lectures. The researcher investigated the macro-structure and the micro-features of seven university lectures from various disciplines. She then identified six metadiscoursal phases which form the macro-structure of university lectures: discourse structuring, conclusion, evaluation, interaction, theory or content, and examples. These six phases are believed to recur discontinuously as a lecture develops, and thus she considered a lecture to have multiple beginnings, middles, and ends. Among the six phases, the relatively critical phase in university lectures is the phase of discourse structuring. This phase is where lecturers indicate to the audience 19.

(31) the directions of the lecture, which is thus also called “announcing phase” (p. 166) (e.g., So what I will do first is). The discourse structuring phase is especially highlighted by the researcher because it was frequently seen in her lecture data and also played an important role in signaling the occurrence of new information. In terms of the pedagogical importance of such phasal analysis, Young claimed that knowledge of macro-structures of lectures could assist students in predicting and understanding lectures. Young further emphasized that ESP teachers should be familiar with such structure so they can present students with a schema that reflect what is going on in university lectures. Similar to the importance of schema in facilitating the understanding of narrative structure, Young argued that schema is also important for understanding expository spoken discourse (e.g., lectures), since the process of comprehension is also associated with filling the information conveyed into the empty slot of a schema properly (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1978). Such proposition was also supported by Tauroza and Allison (1994). They also further promoted the importance of raising students’ awareness of formal schemata of academic lectures. Focusing primarily on structure variations of topic introduction in lectures, Palmer-Silveira (2004) established four trends in terms of the way in which a topic is introduced based on an examination of the lectures of law, business, and sociology. 20.

(32) The researcher emphasized that topic introduction is essential in a lecture in that it provides the audience with the information regarding what the lecture will be about and the aim of the lecture. The analysis of the introductions of the lectures allowed the researcher to propose four general ways regarding how a lecturer introduces a new topic in a lecture: a) explicitly introducing the topic occasionally with an outline of the lecture b) explicitly introducing the topic by referencing to previously acquired knowledge c) introducing the topic by using an example d) introducing the topic through a humorous remark Among them, Palmer-Silveira indicated that the first and the second ways were found to be more common across the lecturers, showing the frequent metadiscursive feature of topic introduction in lectures. His finding also suggested the potential role metadiscursive devices play in structuring lecture introductions, which are also a trend drawing many researchers’ attention. Metadiscourse, which is referred to as “discourse about discourse” (Vande Kopple, 1985, p. 83), is one aspect that is frequently examined by researchers to understand how a lecture is organized and structured. It is originally considered a tool applied by writers to establish connections with the reader and to guide the reader 21.

(33) through the text, as well as to organize ideas (Hyland, 2005), which is also found to be used in spoken discourse by speakers to their audience. Mauranen (2010) further argued that metadiscourse is a “crucial aspect of human communication”, and is more essential in spoken discourse compared to written discourse, considering speakers’ greater “need to manage spoken interaction in real time” (p. 37). Considering the important role of metadiscourse in spoken discourse, there have been many studies exploring lecture discourse from a metadiscoursive perspective. Some investigations targeted certain metadiscursive devices in cross-comparisons. For example, Crawford Camiciottoli (2004) compared the use of interactive discourse structuring between guest lecturers (L1 and L2) and classroom L1 lecturers. Lee and Subtirelu (2015) compared the use of metadiscourse between content classroom lectures and EAP classes conducted by native English speakers. Thompson (2003) investigated the text-structuring metadiscursive features in university lectures, and made comparison with those appearing in listening materials designed for EAP courses. From a multimodal perspective, the researcher also explored how changes of intonation serves as a resource to highlight the structure of lectures. Ädel (2010) proposed an empirically-based taxonomy of metadiscourse and their discourse functions in a corpus of 30 academic lectures and 130 essays. Her taxonomy contains two main metadiscourse types, which are metatext and audience interaction. 22.

(34) The former describes how a lecture is organized (e.g., last class I talked about) and the latter highlights speaker-listener interactions (e.g., did I answer your question). The researcher suggested that “anyone using spoken and written academic English needs to be intimately familiar with the rhetorical acts and recurrent linguistic patterns involved in metadiscourse, both for comprehension and for production” (p. 94), which is potentially more important to non-native academic-oriented learners. Moreover, studying such devices is also considered very helpful to prospective lecturers because these devices can help them to more clearly see how a lecture is organized and structured (Bernad-Mechó, 2017). 2.1.3 Discourse-structuring lexical features of academic lectures In addition to focusing on the overall structure of academic lectures in facilitating lecture comprehension, some researchers have turned their attention to smaller lexical components, such as discourse markers and lexical bundles, to investigate how they function as cues to signal different communicative purposes in academic lectures or how they help structure the lecture discourse. Chaudron and Richards’ (1986) seminal research investigated the effect of both macro-markers (e.g., to begin with, one of the problems was, as you may have heard) and micro-markers (or discourse markers) (e.g., well, okay, so, now) on students’ comprehension of lectures. They found that macro-markers could better help students 23.

(35) to recall text materials compared to micro-markers. They argued that macro-markers provide signals for students to recognize topic transitions or to capture major ideas in lectures. Although students might not have a comprehensive understanding of the lecture contents or the rhetorical structure of the lecture, they can at least make use of these signals to construct an appropriate schematic model of the major parts in the lecture and grab some key ideas. Chaudron and Richards even noted that micromarkers may not be very helpful in terms of assisting students in comprehending lectures. Flowerdew and Miller (1997) also highlighted the important role of macromarkers in lecture comprehension, stating that both native or non-native students do pick up on the use of such markers. If used well, such markers could be beneficial to students in listening comprehension. However, it was especially noted by them that students should be warned that there might be “false signals” (p. 40) when such markers are used. That is, although the lecturer has used a macro-marker, there might be no follow-up, as what the researchers observed in an authentic lecture where “a macro-marker was used but not followed up on” (p. 40). Focusing on discourse markers, Flowerdew and Tauroza (1995) questioned Chaudron and Richards’ (1986) proposition that discourse markers are not helpful in facilitating lecture comprehension. To figure out, they had one group of non-native 24.

(36) students listen to a lecture with discourse markers, while the other group of non-native students listened to the same lecture but with the discourse markers removed purposefully from the lecture. The researchers reported that non-native students found it very difficult to understand the content without discourse markers. The researchers thus argued that discourse markers play an essential role in terms of non-native students’ listening comprehension of lectures. Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999) later have also noted the importance of discourse markers in spoken discourse, considering them elements that are inserted at the beginning of a turn in conversation to interactively give signals to the interlocutor the direction of the talk. Later, Jung (2003) conducted a study similar to Flowerdew and Tauroza’s (1995) to investigate the effect of organization markers (e.g., the point is, the next thing is) on L2 learners’ comprehension of important points in lectures. In the experiment, the students were divided into groups of marker and nonmarker, with the marker group listening to a lecture with organization markers included, while the nonmarker group listening to one without those markers. The students were later asked to recall and summarize the main points from the lecture. The result showed that the marker group comprehended the main points in the lecture better than the nonmarker group, suggesting the important role organization markers play in facilitating listeners’ lecture comprehension. A similar research was conducted by Jung (2006) on 25.

(37) investigating the role of contextulization markers (e.g., let me repeat it, to sum up so far) on L2’s learners’ lecture comprehension. The result again showed that L2 learners exposed to lectures with contextualization markers could reach a higher level of listening comprehension. More recently, Zare and Keivanloo-Shahrestanaki (2017) set out to investigate whether explicitly raising L2 learners’ genre awareness through the instruction of importance markers (e.g., you need to remember this) will facilitate their retrieval of the important points in lectures. Their results showed that the learners who received explicit instruction on importance markers could better comprehend the lecture as well as grab more important points in the lecture compared to those students who did not receive such instruction. Such finding also emphasizes the importance of explicitly directing students’ attention to such markers, so they are more likely to comprehend lecture contents better. Overall, although there have been some mixed results regarding whether different types of markers could facilitate L2 learners’ lecture comprehension, it is generally recognized that discourse-structuring expressions or text-organization markers play important roles in facilitating students’ comprehension of lectures. Another discourse-organizing lexical feature that have attracted much attention is the study of frequent recurrent multi-word expressions, also commonly referred to as 26.

(38) lexical bundles. This feature is usually studied through a corpus-based approach. For example, Biber et al. (2004) have taken a corpus-based approach and identified frequent lexical bundles drawing on a large collection of texts of university teaching and textbooks. They found that the lexical bundles frequently occurring in lectures can perform the functions of showing speakers’ stance, making references, and organizing discourse. Lexical bundles that performed discourse organizing function are especially important in highlighting the structure of the lecture in that they could help signal the introduction of new topics or focus of topics, and the elaboration or clarification of topics. Biber et al.’s study also further showed that there are great variations in terms of the use of lexical bundles between university classroom teaching and textbooks. Based on Biber et al.’s (2004) research, Biber and Barbieri (2007) further investigated lexical bundles across different registers in university settings. Their finding further highlighted the important role of discourse-organizing lexical bundles in lectures, as most lexical bundles identified in their study served such function. Nesi and Basturkmen (2006) also indicated the cohesive role of lexical bundles in structuring lecture discourse. They also emphasized that these lexical bundles performing a discourse signaling role could help students to “predict the nature of upcoming ideas and information” in lectures (p. 301). It was further emphasized by 27.

(39) the researchers that if a student is unable to recognize such signals, s/he will “be faced with additional cognitive processing demands, having to deduce both the intrinsic meaning of propositions, and make inferences about the relations between them” (p. 301). In addition to the formulaic lexical sequence’ functions of topic introduction and topic elaboration which were previously identified by Biber et al. (2004), SimpsonVlach and Ellis (2010) further identified many more functions that formulaic lexical sequences could perform to organize lectures, such as serving as marking discourse, performing metadiscourse function, signaling textual reference, and emphasizing causal relationship. These studies have demonstrated the great potential of frequent lexical bundles in facilitating non-native students’ lecture comprehension, since many of them serve a discourse-organizing role in structuring lecture discourse, and can also be considered as cues signaling how a lecture is organized to students. Such expressions are thus important to students’ lecture comprehension, as Hoey (2001) stated that “accurate recognition of the signals and their significance for the texts’ development can greatly ease a reader’s processing burden in that it lessens the need for large-scale hypothesis forming at the same time as all that detailed micro-processing going on” (p. 32). It should be the same case for the comprehension of lectures. 28.

(40) 2.1.4 Disciplinary differences of academic lectures Although discipline is commonly recognized in academic writing to be an important variable that could potentially affect language productions, there is only a limited number of studies that have explored disciplinary variations in academic lectures (Ädel 2008; Schleef 2008). One of the earlier research discussing such issue was Brown and Bakhtar (1988). They identified five distinctive styles of lecturing and found that different lecture styles are associated with different disciplines. For example, lecturers of humanities are commonly associated with oral style while visual lecturers are frequently seen in science-related disciplines. Based on the findings, Brown and Bakhtar claimed that discipline is a contributing factor that strongly influences a lecturer’s lecturing style, regardless of his/her experiences or status. This proposition is further supported by Neumann (2001). The researcher suggested that the nature of individual disciplines could extensively influence lecturers’ teaching styles. For example, lecturers of humanities were found to spend more time on lecturing, while lecturers of technology-related fields tended to focus more on laboratory instruction. Deroey and Taverniers’ (2011) functional analysis of lectures also discovered disciplinary variations of lecture functions across different disciplines (arts and humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences). They identified six main 29.

(41) functions of lectures: informing, elaborating, evaluating, organizing discourse, interacting and managing the class, with each main function supplemented with multiple subfunctions. The researchers reported that recounting, a subfunction of informing, was found frequently in lectures of arts and humanities while absent in lectures of physical sciences. Also, in terms of the function of evaluating, it was found that in lectures of the disciplines that are open to interpretations, such as arts and humanities, evaluations were used to express certainty or significance. Whereas, in lectures of the disciplines that are heavily based on experimental evidence, evaluations were usually used to highlight the establishment of certain concept. On the other hand, several studies have taken ethnographic approaches to exploring disciplinary differences across lectures through classroom observation. Focusing on lectures of computer science, Hoey (1983) reported that the lecturers delivered lessons following a problem-solution pattern. Dudley-Evans (1994) found that lecturers of engineering usually adopted a point-driven strategy in presenting lecture contents, while lecturers of plant biology developed their lectures following the framework of plant classification. Flowerdew and Miller (1995) also found that in lectures of public and social administration, a comparison pattern was frequently used when lecturers were comparing differences between two systems. Concept. 30.

(42) explanation and example illustration were however more often observed in economic lectures. Particularly focusing on questions and answers in academic lectures, Chang (2012) investigated whether patterns of questions would be influenced by different disciplinary cultures. The forms and functions of questions appearing in lectures of different disciplines were compared. The researcher concluded that there are in fact much more similarities than differences in terms of question patterns in lectures across different disciplines. These studies have demonstrated that there are disciplinary variations across lectures in a number of aspects, specifically in terms of the styles of teaching as well as the strategies adopted by lecturers to develop and organize lectures. As also argued by Dudley-Evans (1994), it would not be surprising to find that there are different organizational patterns, or at least different balance of different lecture types across different disciplinary areas, considering that differences across academic disciplines have long been established (Becher, 1994). 2.1.5 Summary These studies have demonstrated that students’ ability to recognize or understand the discourse structures of lectures could greatly influence their comprehension of lectures. Some lexical elements, such as discourse makers and lexical bundles, can 31.

(43) also be helpful to students’ lecture comprehension, because they serve as cues signaling the directions of the lecture, the information regarding what is going to happen, and the transitions between topics. Therefore, if students are able to detect such elements, it will be easier for them to identify the major portion of a lecture so they are more likely to construct an appropriate schematic model of the lecture. This may help them locate the information conveyed in different parts of the lecture and form a rough picture of the main ideas included in the lecture. However, as what Flowerdew and Miller (1997) found, lecturers’ use of linguistic cues, especially the macro-markers, is not consistent, and there will be false signals every now and then. That is, there may not always be reliable signals of the structure of the lecture. Although the findings regarding the effects of these lexical features on comprehension of lectures have been inconclusive, these studies nevertheless demonstrate the importance of lexical features, especially lexical bundles, in facilitating students’ comprehension of lectures as well as in structuring the lecture discourse. Previous studies also revealed that there are disciplinary variations in terms of certain aspects of academic lectures, such as teaching styles, functions of lecture discourses, and patterns of discourse structure. Although these studies have increased the current understanding in terms of in what aspects and to what extent disciplinary cultures could influence the delivery of academic lectures, the number of studies 32.

(44) focused on such issue and the aspects the existing studies took to approach such issue have been limited. Therefore, how lectures of different disciplinary fields are organized deserve more research from different perspectives. In addition to looking at teaching styles or discourse patterns of lectures, a top-down genre-oriented approach, i.e. rhetorical move analysis, has also been increasingly taken by researchers to shed light on how lecture discourse is structured rhetorically. The following section then turns to explain what a rhetorical move analysis is and discuss how it could improve our understanding of the lecture genre through its rhetorical move structure.. 33.

(45) 2.2 Rhetorical Move Structure Analysis 2.2.1 Genre and rhetorical moves According to Swales (1990), genre is comprised of “a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (p. 58). In Askehave and Swales (2001), they further elaborated this earlier definition, stating that “the communicative purpose of a genre…shapes the genre and provides it with an internal structure－a schematic structure” (p. 198). The identification and description of rhetorical structures of genres in terms of moves have been one of the crucial components in genre studies, because “the rhetorical purpose of individual moves contributes to the communicative purpose of genre as a whole” (Samraj, 2014, p. 386). That is, through examining a genre’s move structure and the individual rhetorical functions of moves, the communicative purposes and characteristics of the genre can be elucidated. Swales (2004) refers to a move as a “discoursal or rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function” (p. 228). It can also be viewed as “a section of a text that performs a specific communicative function” (Connor, Upton, & Kanoksilapatham, 2007, p. 23), or “a stretch of written or spoken discourse” that achieves a specific purpose in the text (Cortes, 2013, p. 35). Each move has its own purpose, and when working together with other moves, they constitute the 34.

(46) communicative purpose of a text. That is, each move “contributes to the overall communicative purposes of the genre” (Connor et al., 2007, p. 23). Then together, moves “constitute the rationale for the genre” in that they help “shape the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style” (Swales, 1990, p. 58). Analysis of rhetorical move structure can therefore expand existing understanding of a genre. Typically, the general organizational patterns of texts are considered to be composed of a series of moves, with each move performing its purpose individually and together achieving an overall communicative purpose of the genre (Connor, Davies, & De Rycker, 1995). Although Swales (2004) indicated that move is a functional unit rather than a formal one, some researchers still tried to align moves with grammatical or linguistic units (Crookes, 1986). However, Samraj (2014) pointed out that “delineating moves in a genre” is a very challenging task for analysts (p. 386). Although each move at least contains a proposition, the length of a move varies from a few sentences to several paragraphs (Connor & Mauranen, 1999). Therefore, the process of identifying moves can be “a difficult and contentious activity”, and even experienced readers “often fail to agree on the interpretation of moves (or where they begin or end)” (Bloor, 1998, p. 60). In a move analysis, linguistic features are often used to help identify the 35.

(47) boundaries between moves (Cortes, 2013; Nwogu, 1997). As Swales (2004) admitted, the identification of moves and their boundaries are based on a “mixed bag of criteria” (p. 229), involving “our intuitions based on our knowledge of text schemata” (Samraj, 2014, p. 386). Due to the difficulties in identifying moves and their boundaries, many researchers have also included more than one raters in the identification process to increase the reliability of the coding process (e.g., Chang & Huang, 2015; Li & Ge, 2009). In terms of the frequency of occurring, some move types are more frequent than others in a particular genre, making them conventional/obligatory moves, while the less frequent ones are usually considered as optional ones. However, there are variations among researchers in terms of the criteria applied to determine whether a move is considered conventional to a specific genre. Generally, a move is considered conventional if it appears in 100% of the texts (e.g., Flowerdew & Dudley-Evans, 2002; Basturkmen, 2012), while some researchers consider a move conventional if it appears in more than 50% of the texts (e.g., Lee, 2016; Li & Ge, 2009). Some studies even revealed that in some genres, such as conference proposals, conventional moves are not always necessarily presented (e.g., Halleck & Connor, 2006). That is, some genres are not as conventional as others are in terms of following rather fixed move structures. Instead, different degree of creativity might be allowed in different genres 36.

(48) in terms of the use of moves. In addition to depending only on frequencies of certain moves to determine whether a move is conventional or not, the length of a move taking up in a text as well as to what extent a move is recycled in a text are also criteria used by researchers to claim the importance of individual moves (Samraj, 2014). In addition to moves, researchers also turn to identify units smaller than moves to describe what moves consist of in order to achieve their purposes. Generally, moves may contain one or multiple elements that “together, or in some combination, realize the move” (Connor et al., 2007, p. 24), which are referred to as “steps” (Swales, 1990), or “strategies” (Bhatia, 1993; Henry & Roseberry, 2001b), to specify “how the writer or speaker chooses to realize or execute the move” (Henry & Roseberry, 2001b, p. 154). Kwan (2006) referred to strategies as “non-obligatory and non-sequential constituents” of moves, and considers steps as the “obligatory and sequential constituents” of moves. Barron (2012), on the other hand, maintains that strategies can be used to refer to either moves or sub-moves. Despite great variations existing among the use of terms, step is relatively more frequently-used to describe the constituents of a move. In terms of the components of a rhetorical move structure analysis, although it is argued that the description of a dual scheme containing both move and step could be 37.

(49) of higher value for pedagogical and descriptive purposes (Yang & Allison, 2003), not all descriptions of genres contain both of them. As Samraj (2014) pointed out, steps are functional elements that could be either optional or obligatory, which are in fact not given much importance in genre analyses (Kwan, 2006). Therefore, even when a genre is composed of dual scheme, not every move has constituent steps. As such, Samraj (2014) indicated that some moves are simply “more rhetorically complex” than others (p. 387). In terms of the order of moves, Samraj (2014) highlighted the importance to consider both “the linear and hierarchical ordering of moves and their constituent steps” (p. 385). That is, in addition to considering the multi-layer nature of a genre in terms of the levels of move and step, the other key aspect to describe move structure of a genre is through the sequential order that moves and steps tend to appear. Swales (1990) argued that “there are good general and applied reasons for assigning numerical sequence to textual elements that occur in suitably robust preferred orders” (p. 145). Such argument has been exemplified in some studies where moves seem to appear following a stipulated order such as what was described in Swales’ (1990) Creating a Research Space (CARS) model based on the moves of research article introductions. Allison and Yang (2003) also reported that the steps that realize a purpose of a move seem to follow the same order. However, some studies found that 38.

(50) the order in which moves and steps appear is not always the same, as sometimes it is not straightforward for researchers to place certain moves and steps in a rhetorical structure of a genre (Samraj, 2002). Also, sometimes a number of moves could appear repeatedly, as what Hopkins and Dudley-Evans (1988) called cyclical patterns. The challenge of establishing an order for moves in spoken genres has been especially highlighted due to the “inherent flexibility of speech genres” (RowleyJolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2005, p. 56). For example, Thompson (1994) indicated the variability in terms of the sequencing of moves in her research on the moves of lecture introductions. Similarly, Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas (2005) found that the position as to the component outline structure/scope in conference presentations is fairly unpredictable. 2.2.2 Rhetorical move structure analyses of academic genres Previous section has provided detailed description of rhetorical move structure analysis. Among the studies that applied such analysis, a majority of them have focused on academic genres. The following section then turns to review the studies on the rhetorical move structures of academic written genres and academic lectures. 2.2.2.1 Rhetorical move structure analyses of academic written genres Although there has been some research examining rhetorical move structures of academic written genres, such as book reviews (Motta-Roth, 1998), grant proposals 39.

(51) (Connor & Mauranen, 1999), and job application letters (Bhatia, 1993; Henry & Rosenberry, 2001b), the genre that received particular attention is research articles (Cortes, 2013). Swale’s (1990) pioneering work described the move structure of research article introductions following the model he proposed, commonly known as the CARS model. This model has laid an essential foundation for the investigation of rhetorical move structure of research articles, giving rise to a plethora of studies exploring such genre based on Swales’ model. As such, many frameworks manifesting the move structure of research articles are proposed, based on the identification of rhetorical moves in different sections of research articles by a number of researchers. Some researchers investigated the move structure of entire research articles, including the sections of introduction, method, result, and discussion (e.g., Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2015; Kanoksilapatham, 2007; Nwogu, 1997; Zhang, Kopak, Freund, & Rasmussen, 2011). In addition to the four main sections of a research article, some researchers even included the move analysis of the abstract section, such as Tessuto (2015), and Chang and Kuo (2011). Instead of examining the move structure of entire research articles, a number of researchers focused on identifying move structure of specific sections in research articles. For example, Kwan (2006) conducted a move-step analysis focusing only on the literature review section in 40.