The Expression Of Critical Thinking In Literature Review And Its Developmental Features From The Perspective Of Social/Cognitive Genre Model

Critical thinking refers to the author’s evaluative judgments about concepts,events,and actions in a particular field,and the judgments should be based on the standards of that field.The expression of critical thinking(criticality)refers to the evaluative judgement that reflects the author’s critical thinking and is inextricably embedded within the disciplinary discourses that attach to a particular text(Bruce,2020).One of the important communicative purposes of research articles is to express critical thinking(Bruce,2020).The core of literature review in academic article is to critically evaluate previous research and constructs a research niche,and its critical expression is important for establishing the research significance.Though numerous published manuals(Cone & Foster,1993;Bitchener,2009;Ridley,2012)have emphasized the importance of enacting criticality in academic text,they failed to provide specific and practical guidance on this issue(Bruce,2020;Chen Zehang,2022).Meanwhile,the existing manuals have not distinguished between“expert writers” and “novice writers” when investigating the expression of critical thinking in academic text.Apparently,the academic writing guidance needed by expert and novice writers are varied,because the ability of expressing critical thinking of writers will develop along with the advance of their academic stages.Thus,they need different writing guidance,and the latter need more scaffolding guidance(Wette,2020).Therefore,a comparative analysis of the expression of critical thinking in literature review written by the same author at different stages will help teachers to provide targeted advice and to train authors at different stages of the graduate.Bruce claimed to utilize a more multidimensional,holistic approach to analyzing how critical thinking is expressed textually and proposed the social/cognitive genre model(2008a)to provide the theoretical and analytical framework for text analysis.As a dual approach to genre knowledge,social/cognitive genre model contains both social and cognitive genre elements.The former includes the Context,Epistemology,Stance and Content schemata,while the latter includes the Gestalt patterns of ideas,General textual patterns and Relations between propositions.In order to figure out the developmental features of the expression of critical thinking in literature review,this study will be conducted from three aspects of critical thinking in LRs of MA and Ph D dissertations in applied linguistics,i.e.,move structure,stance markers and interpropositional relations in the social/cognitive genre model.This research aims to provide some practical guidance for the teaching of academic English in the aspect of critical thinking expressing.This paper selects the dissertations in the field of second language writing in applied linguistics as the research object through CNKI and Wanfangdata.In the screening process,the researcher compares them one by one to ensure that both MA and Ph D dissertations come from the same author.Finally,there are 15 theses being collected in MA and Ph D stages of the same one author,respectively.Then,the literature review chapters of 30 theses will be extracted to construct two corpora.Based on the move structure model by Kwan(2006),30 LRs are segmented into specific thematic units according to the rhetoric purpose of each unit.The software MAXQDA 2020 will be adopted to tag and account the use frequency of moves and steps.As for the analysis of stance metadiscourse,the software Ant Conc3.5.9 is used to calculate to frequency and distribution of stance markers in the LRs of MA and Ph D dissertations according to the stance wordlist provided by Hyland(2005),where hedges,boosters,attitude markers and self-mention are included.Finally,the concession contra-expectation relations(Crombie,1985)in Move 2 of 30 LRs are encoded by MAXQDA2020,and the frequency and regular occurrence pattern of the concession contra-expectation relations and the specific moves and strategies are counted and abstracted.Meanwhile,the high frequency words in the segments of concession contra-expectation relations in Move 2 in two sets are generated with the adaptation of Lancs Box,so as to sum up the developmental features in the expression of critical thinking through the concession contra-expectation relations between MA and Ph D LRs.This research aims to answer two questions:1.How does criticality is expressed in the literature review chapters of applied linguistics MA and Ph D dissertations by adopting the means of stance markers,move structure and concession contra-expectation relation?2.What are the developmental features between MA and Ph D dissertations literature review chapters in applied linguistics when expressing critical thinking?What implicatures can be imposed to the academic English writing pedagogy?The findings of this paper are as following:(1)Writers at MA phase rely more on stance metadiscourse to express their critical thinking while the use of move structure is inept.Even though writers adopt four types of stance metadiscourse to demonstrate their attitudes,there are some cases of misuse and abuse.As for the move structure,MA writers use the Move1 more frequently,but seldom involve the more complicated move patterns.It indicates that writers at MA stage are relatively unfamiliar with the moves and strategies and are inept to construct the contextual structure.(2)Writers at Ph D stage tend to express their critical thinking through the construction of move structure and rely less on the micro linguistic devices,i.e.,stance metadiscourse.It demonstrates that Ph D writers express their stances and attitudes more cautiously,and distance themselves from readers.In addition,Ph D writers have mastered more types of recursive move patterns,especially the pattern of“Move1-2”,and has been shaped into “background-critique” pattern.In a word,writers at Ph D stage have gradually closed themselves to the expert writers in term of expressing critical thinking.(3)Ph D writers perform better when using concession contra-expectation relation to reflect the objectivity of their critical evaluation,while the evaluations of MA writers are more general and common.Ph D writers use more concession contraexpectation relation in constructing the research space,and can consider both the contributions and shortcomings of previous research.Specifically,they are capable to flexibly use the concession relation to express their critical evaluation in a roundabout way,realizing the dialogue between two conflicting views.In addition,the use of more attitude markers in the concessions at the Ph D stage also indicates that the Ph D writers tend to express their own attitudes in a roundabout way by means of concessions,and their critical thinking expressions tend to be more objective.Based on the above findings,we suggest that in academic English writing,especially in literature review writing,teachers should guide students to appropriately adopt specific tools at different levels to convey their critical thinking,involving the move structure at the macro level,the stance metadiscourse at the micro level and the concession counterexpectation relations at the intersentence level.In addition,the integration of above three means should be emphasized,as well as the developmental features of from MA to Ph D stage.Also,we should remind that the influence of the distinctiveness in the requirements of dissertations at different stages of postgraduate training should be taken into consideration.