Academic Writing and Reader Engagement offers a concise linguistic description of the use and functions of questions in English, French and Spanish and discusses their value to the teaching of academic writing.
This book:
- Enables a better understanding of how writers engage readers in academic writing in English, French, and Spanish and where each language behaves similarly or differently;
- Explains how authors express opinions, organise discourse and create relationships with readers via questions in their academic writing and the various functions questions perform;
- Brings together research on corpus and contrastive linguistics, highlighting how these two fields can support one another;
- Offers a thorough investigation of reader engagement markers from a range of linguistic perspectives and considers how knowledge of these markers could be applied to the teaching and learning of academic writing in each language;
- Employs corpus data totalling approximately 1.2 million words from all three languages to illustrate the varying roles and representations of questions in each language.
Providing an invaluable resource for scholars learning to communicate successfully within their academic community, as well as teachers of English, French and/or Spanish for academic purposes, this book is key reading for students and researchers of academic discourse, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics.
Table of Contents:
List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1. Academic Discourse as a Social, Global, and Multilingual Discourse; 2. Academic writing, evaluation, and reader engagement in the English, French, and Spanish research article; 3. Corpus-based contrastive analysis: theoretical foundations and applications; 4. A corpus-based contrastive analysis of direct and indirect questions in English, French, and Spanish; 5. Corpus-based contrastive analysis of question use as a shared rhetorical feature of reader engagement in English, French, and Spanish; 6. Corpus-based contrastive analysis of question function as a shared rhetorical feature of reader engagement in English, French, and Spanish: Part I; 7 Corpus-based contrastive analysis of question function as a shared rhetorical feature of reader engagement in English, French, and Spanish: Part II; 8. Questions as reader engagement in English, French and Spanish: discussion of findings; 9. Closing Remarks; Index
About the Author :
Niall Curry is Lecturer and ASPiRE Fellow at Coventry University, UK.
Review :
"A rare example of a book presenting excellent original research on academic writing in a multilingual and multicultural context. Academic Writing and Reader Engagement points the way forward to greater inclusion of languages other than English in this important area of language research."
Angela Chambers, University of Limerick, Ireland
"This volume fills a major gap in contrastive analysis research in academic writing. Curry’s discussion of academic writing across languages and cultures will be immensely useful to researchers examining writing in English, French and Spanish well into the first half of the 21st century. His critique of contrastive rhetoric theories will similarly spark interesting debates in the field about the role of corpora and how to approach comparability in multilingual sites of engagement."
Pascual Pérez-Paredes, University of Murcia, Spain
"This volume offers comprehensive descriptions of the linguistic patterns of questions as reader engagement devices in economics research papers. It sheds light on the illocutionary force of academic papers written in international languages, showing that science may be multilingual but persuasion is universal".
María Luisa Carrió Pastor, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
