Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación.

UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

Feedback first mid-term test. Part 1: the nature of academic

discourse

The most recurrent mistakes in the answers to the first mid-term test result, in general,
from a lack of comprehension of some notions already discussed in the first part of the
year. They are mainly of two kinds:

• Conceptual errors related to the nature of academic discourse and the way
academic writers select and produce the contents of their texts.
• Conceptual errors related to the linguistic concepts included in the assigned
reading materials.

This guide deals with the first kind of mistakes: conceptual errors about the nature of
academic discourse and what academic writers usually do.

The nature of academic discourse

The purpose of this section is to improve comprehension of the steps that researchers
in general, and linguists in particular, take in order to carry out their research and, in
consequence, produce new knowledge.

This will allow us to compare their work to the kind of tasks that students are assigned
in this course which, in fact, represent the very first steps any university student should
take in order to:

• be able to understand the theory that they study;

• be able to apply what was learnt in these theorethical texts to the work in their future
professional life, which may include doing research.

1. Gentle reminder

Besides (and before) the materials you will find in this class, we suggest revising your
notes and guides for the practical classes, which have already addressed today’s topic.

From these classes, we remind you of the following ideas:

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

“Students in this course are not expected to write academic texts which will be as
authoritative and influential as those of the authors they read, because being able to
write in this way takes many years of study and research, usually after graduation.
This is why, as you can see in the question assignment analysed in the previous class, the
questions you will have to answer always make some reference to your experience and
knowledge as students and the concrete circumstances of your future professional life,
as you know it by now. In other words, you are expected to answer from your own, real
standpoint as a student.
The texts that we analyse in this course should only be taken as examples of academic
discourse and good academic practices, from which you can learn what is important to
consider to produce discourse that will be accepted by the rest of the academic
community and also in professional environments.
The published texts that are analysed in this course should never be seen as a model that
you are expected to reproduce or imitate faithfully, but as examples that will help you
understand the nature of academic discourse.”

2. On academic discourse
a) Read Berkeley University (s/d) “A science checklist” (1)
(https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_03). Learning about this basic
concept is central to understanding what kind of academic texts students are usually
asked to write at university, especially in terms of contents.

(1) This text is part of the series “Understanding Science. How science really works”, which you can find
on https://undsci.berkeley.edu/index.php. It makes easy (and quick) reading and gives a very clear picture
of the kind of knowledge that students are usually exposed to at university. We recommend you read it.

Summarise in your own words what science does, and what the characteristics of the
knowledge gained by science are. Discuss in class any concept that may not be clear to
you. Take notes. You will need them at the end of the class.

b) Linguistics is a science. Let us analyse how this general definition applies to if by

reading the following abstract of a research project directed by Prof. Dr. Luisa Granato,
ex Professor of English Language 3 and first Doctor in Linguistics of the UNLP.
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

Roles e imagen en la interacción verbal: una aproximación socio-pragmática / H359

Director: Granato, Luisa Graciana

Participantes: Móccero, María Leticia; Piatti, Guillermina Inés

Unidad ejecutora: Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Lingüísticas

Fecha de inicio: 01-01-2003 Fecha de finalización: 31-12-2005

Tipo de proyecto: Proyecto de Investigación y desarrollo (PI+D)

Organismo financiador: Secretaría de Políticas Universitarias

Campo de aplicación: Ciencias sociales

Area temática: Lingüística

Notas: Datos extraídos del Programa de Incentivos a Docentes-Investigadores, Secretaría de

Políticas Universitarias, Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología, Argentina. Disponible en
http://incentivos.spu.edu.ar, consulta realizada el 10 de octubre de 2007. Y del sitio de la
Secretaría de Ciencia y Técnica, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina; disponible en
http://www.presi.unlp.edu.ar/secyt/, consulta realizada el 5 de diciembre de 2007.

Resumen: El propósito de esta investigación es continuar con el estudio de las características de

la interacción verbal oral. Se tomará como base un corpus de grabaciones de conversaciones
informales, producidas dentro del ámbito académico. Desde una perspectiva socio-pragmática,
se abordarán contexto e interacción como elementos interdependientes, se estudiarán los roles
y la identidad de los hablantes proyectados en la interrelación y se analizará cuáles son las
diferentes estrategias utilizadas y sus manifestaciones lingüísticas. El análisis de los datos
permitirá identificar los procesos socio-pragmáticos involucrados en la construcción del
significado y los juegos de poder que conllevan cambios de posturas e identidad, así como
aspectos relativos a distancia social en términos de simetría o asimetría formal y funcional en
los intercambios. Se espera que los resultados de la investigación contribuyan a la
caracterización del español de Argentina en eventos comunicativos en el ámbito académico y
ofrezcan un nuevo constructo descriptivo aplicable a interacciones de este tipo.

Palabras claves: Interacción - Contexto - Roles - Identidad - Cortesía

https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/library?a=d&c=proyecto&d=Jpy240
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

We will use this information to analyse the basic characteristics of any research project,
in any discipline. Read it and continue to take notes about the following to complement
the summary you wrote above, about what science does:

• Contextual information, i.e. where the project is situated in terms of the institutions
that support it and who will carry it out.
• Previous knowledge of the topic, theoretical framework and the discipline it belongs
to.
• Object of analysis, linguistic data that will be analysed:
• Methods that will be used to analyse these data:
• New information/knowledge that, according to the researchers’ hypothesis, this
analysis will allow to discover:

NB: a summary of this kind is followed by a detailed description of each of its parts, in
order to make the research proposal clear to evaluators (who are, of course, specialists
in the same area). This way, they can assess if the contribution to science made by that
project is relevant and original, i.e. if it will really help to explain, through that discipline,
some aspect of the natural world that is not clearly understood yet.

Now discuss this question as a class: what does the previous description help a university
student understand better about the academic texts they read, and how to interpret
them?

SIDE COMMENT: Let us take a minute to observe the kind of language in this text: it is
clear, concise and to the point as described in a previous guide.

Academic discourse is usually like this, regardless of the language it is written in.

c) Research results are usually published in the form of papers, book chapters, books or
other similar texts and also discussed in scientific events such as congresses. Read the
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

following text, in which Ken Hyland explains this practice from the point of view of
linguistics, and discuss these questions as a class:

Hyland, K. (2009) Points of Departure. In Academic Discourse (pp. 1-19). London & New
York: Continuum.

• In 1.1, p.1, Hyland introduces the idea of two different functions that academic
discourse performs. What are these two functions? How can you use them to
describe what members of academia (both graduates and undergraduates) typically
do?
• Why do you think that Hyland devotes only one paragraph to the first function, while
he embarks on a long description and theoretical support of the second?

d) Watch the following video by Prof. Dr. Martin Hilpert, Université de Neuchâtel,
Switzerland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA_THjDUUtA

Answer these questions about it. As you do so, add any new idea that this video has
clarified to the notes that you began in a).

• 4:22 to 5:03: What does this video add to what was explained in the previous texts
about how linguists do research? Hilbert mentions the following:
o Research question.
o Linguistic data.
o Findings.
o Results.

These categories give names to the description of science in a) “A science checklist”. Go

back to it and match the characteristics mentioned there with these four categories.

• Research funding: 5:05 to 6:45: what else do you learn here about the work of a
researcher? Does this help you see how much work there is behind each of the
assertions made by the authors whose texts you read? Do you think a student can
make the same kind of assertions without all this previous knowledge, work, team
effort and fundings?

• Pros and cons: as of 14:20. What else do you learn about what linguists do and how
they produce knowledge?
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

• What do you learn from Prof. Hilpert about how academic discourse works and what
life in academia is like? How is what you hear in this video different or similar from
what you supposed before taking this course, or what you are trying to do when you
produce academic discourse?
• What sources of learning does Prof. Hilpert mention?

e) Watch Studying linguistics at Cambridge and discuss the following in class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHmvzYIf6iw

• What else do you learn from this video about what there is to know before you write?
• How does all of this compare to the sources, grounds and soundness of the ideas you
chose to include in your texts?

Conclusions:

❖ What linguists write is not prattle or discourse created only to feign intelligence or
knowledge; it is science. An academic writer never makes an assertion without
having evidence that supports it, i.e. proof that what they are saying is realistic and
there are ample reasons to consider it true. This evidence can come from the analysis
of data (in the case of Linguistics: language samples, typically a corpus), first-hand
knowledge coming from professional experience or an analysis of other authors’
ideas that allows the writer to come to personal conclusions.
❖ University students have not yet acquired enough knowledge to do this kind of
work at the level of an experienced researcher. This is why they are never asked to
discuss the fundamentals of a science or to produce new concepts or try to re-
elaborate them. Instead, they are asked to begin by drawing conclusions from the
fundamentals of the discipline they are studying, so that they can see their practical
implications and work out how those notions are relevant to their professional lives
(i.e., why a university has decided that they need that kind of knowledge for their
future work or how they help them understand new ideas or solve difficulties).
Thinking with the concepts of a given science is always the first step.
❖ The characterization of academic texts provided in this course does not refer only
to the texts that a degree student writes in college, and that is why descriptions
which only take into consideration these circumstances are frequently inaccurate.
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. UNLP
Lengua Inglesa 3
Clases prácticas

This explains why it is not adequate to summarise other authors’ ideas, and it is even
less adequate to try to reinterpret them in any way or use them as a conclusion when
they are not that but the opposite: given knowledge.

Only other scholars with the same amount of knowledge as those authors are able
to come up with or re-elaborate new theoretical concepts.

• A question assignment, or any other academic text, is not a place for creativity, for
deliberately constructing “attractive” presentations of a topic or “surprising” the
reader at the end with an original conclusion: it is a text which should deal with the
answer to the question from the beginning, in clear language and the order that best
ensures that all of the author’s ideas will be understood.

3. What question assignments in this course really ask

We are giving students the initial version of what will later, if developed, be the
foundation of all research work (and, in fact, all kinds of study for professional reasons):
understanding linguistic phenomena (in our case, coming from the bibliography and
personal experience of students) and drawing conclusions from them.

We will come back to this topic in future classes.