A Contrastive Study On Engagement In Linguistic Learners’ And Experts’ Research Articles

In recent years,English for Academic Purposes(EAP)has become a hot topic in the field of foreign language teaching and research.Research articles(RAs),as typical EAP,are communicative.And the engagement system is a reference framework for interpersonal research.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out engagement research on RAs.At present,there is much domestic and international literature related to research on the RAs of learners and engagement theoretical frameworks.However,in these literatures,there are not many studies on the engagement of Chinese master theses.Thus,the similarities and differences between learners and experts in the use of various engagement methods are not clear.In addition,it is unclear what language expressions are used by learners and experts,because there are few studies designed to report on this.The purpose of this study is to explore the lexical-grammatical realizations of engagement and the similarities and differences between Chinese learners and native language experts in the use of engagement(i.e.,categories of engagement and language expressions of engagement).The research questions of the thesis are as follows:(1)What engagement language expressions are there in RAs?(2)What are the differences and similarities between the engagement expressions of Chinese learners and native experts? Why?(3)What are the differences and similarities between the Chinese learners and native experts in standardized frequencies of various engagement categories? Why? The study selects the main body of 30 master theses of Chinese linguistic postgraduates and 30 comparable linguistic RAs of international journals by experts from English-speaking countries during the period 2019 to 2021 as the corpus.Based on the engagement model of Martin and White(2005),software-assisted annotation was carried out on the corpus,manual inspection was conducted and annotations are summarized,counted and compared.Besides,some issues such as monogloss and heterogloss,the main clause and the subordinate clause,voice of others,examples,inter-sentence engagement,thing and proposition,and the engagement attribution of annotations were discussed and illustrated,and unified standards were adopted in the annotation.The study reported the types of engagement language expressions of Chinese learners and native language experts in the sample corpus.The study found that learners use more dialogic expansion,attribute,endorse and acknowledge,while experts use more other categories than learners.The study explored the possible reasons for the results from three perspectives: academic level,English level,and differences between Chinese and Western thinking and culture.In terms of academic level,the possible characteristics and problems of masters include the insufficient awareness of different voices,the poor use of rhetorical strategies,inadequate position construction,the lack of professional knowledge,the tendency to reduce discourse responsibility,seemingly sufficiently open space for dialogue,the problem of stacking views,restricted language use by mother tongue transfer,the sense of responding to queries,attitudes of thesis that are not easy to understand.The research speculates that these differences may gradually decrease as learners continue to dig deeper into the international academic field.In terms of English level,it is found that experts have a higher proportion of advanced vocabulary,and use vocabulary more freely;there are off-list Test for English Majors-Band 4 and T Test for English Majors-Band 8 words,but they are basically on-list words;except for the professional vocabulary,learners have no use of off-list words.In terms of thinking and culture between China and the West,the study believes that the difference in research results may be due to Chinese learners’ lack of awareness of different voices,their insufficient western debate strategies,the influence on them exerted by the doctrine of golden mean and so on.Theoretically,the research is conducive to the development of the theoretical framework and subsequent engagement tagging.In terms of teaching,it is beneficial for teachers to understand Chinese learners,better implement EAP teaching,and help learners to better carry out academic communicative activities.The study holds that in academic English teaching,it is necessary for learners to strengthen their awareness of debate,improve the means of debate;construct genre schema,improve their professional level;compare Chinese and Western concepts,understand cultural differences;and learn expert expressions to enhance vocabulary ability.