Faculty Publication - Dr. Genggeng Zhang

Emerging Engineering Scholars’ Stance in Citations

This paper presents a mixed-method study that integrates genre-based corpus analysis and discourse-based interviews to examine the form- and stance-related citation patterns in the research articles of ten first- and second-year engineering doctoral students. The corpus analysis reveals strong preferences for stance-marked citations and the proclaim and entertain devices in particular, suggesting that writers use authorial stance to endorse cited propositions or provide likelihood- or evidence-based judgments in citations. Interview results indicate a discordance between writers’ intentions and their stance-related linguistic choices, as well as varied perceptions of authorial stance. Despite the frequent use of stance markers in citations, most writers claimed to be neutral reporters of knowledge. Only a few acknowledged their strategic stance choices and demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the rhetorical roles citations play in their claim-making practices. The findings suggest that students with developing citation expertise lacked the academic and disciplinary expertise to understand the interplay among citations, authorial stance, and rhetorical move/step structures in their research writing. These writers could benefit from explicit feedback that raises their awareness of the strategic use of citations and stance, to facilitate the realization of rhetorical goals in research writing.

'These results are inconsistent'

'This/These + Shell Noun' patterns in Engineering theses and research articles

Shell nouns (SNs; e.g., fact and problem) are an open group of abstract nouns defined functionally through use as emergent ‘shells’ referencing and labeling ideas in surrounding discourse. This paper analyzes the ‘this/these + [SN]’ pattern in second language (L2) English Master’s theses and published English research articles (RAs) across three Engineering disciplines (Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical), with a secondary focus on unattended ‘this/these’ use and disciplinary variation. The corpus includes 60 RAs per discipline (840,683 words) and 25 Master’s theses per discipline (899,182 words). Corpus methods were used to support manual identification of ‘this/these + [SN]’. Results show that L2 English Master’s thesis writers used this pattern significantly less than writers of RAs. Normalized frequencies, frequent SNs, and functional patterns are also presented across genres and disciplines. L2 writers and experts use a similar range of SN types, and expert writers adopt a more rhetorically sophisticated means of organizing information.