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Paradigmatic and educational influences on citation in applied linguistics research articles
Author
Xie, Chaoqun
Supervisor
Hu, Guangwei
Abstract
It is widely accepted that citation plays an irreplaceable part in academic writing. Owing to its multiple cognitive, epistemological, and rhetorical functions in the construction and communication of scientific knowledge, citation has attracted burgeoning attention from the field of English for Research Purposes (ERP). Given widely perceived epistemological differences underlying qualitative and quantitative research articles, citation patterns may vary across research paradigms. By the same token, academics with distinct educational experiences and trained in divergent educational settings may engage in different citation practices. However, the potential effects of research paradigm and educational experience on citation practices have received little attention. In order to address this lacuna, the present study aims to investigate possible citation differences in qualitative and quantitative applied linguistics research articles (RAs) written by Anglophone academics (AA), Chinese academics with overseas educational experience (OA), and home-trained Chinese academics (HA).
To conduct the study, a corpus was constructed that consisted of 120 RAs totaling 674,984 words. The RAs were sampled from six leading international (English) and domestic (Chinese) applied linguistics journals published during a five-year period from 2009 to 2013. Drawing on Coffin‘s (2009) analytic framework that integrates multiple aspects of citation under the unifying perspective of Bakhtinian dialogism, this study identified and analyzed citations in the sampled articles with the assistance of specialized corpus instruments.
Marked cross-paradigmatic and education-related differences in citation use were identified through quantitative analyses of citation frequencies and textual scrutiny of instances of citation in the corpus. The analyses revealed that the qualitative RAs by AA tended to use dialogically expansive citations more frequently, whereas the quantitative RAs by OA and HA deployed more dialogically contractive citations. The identified citing patterns of OA, often taking a middle position between those of AA and HA, indicate a homogenizing effect of Anglophone education on citation practice in Chinese RAs. The findings are discussed in terms of epistemologies underlying different research paradigms, culturally based educational philosophy and institutional practices, the nature of cited propositions, and the homogenizing effect of academic socialization in Anglophone settings on local/regional scholarly publication. After presenting some pedagogical implications derived from the findings of this study, the dissertation concludes that citation is a textual practice which involves a strategic manipulation of multiple features to maximize persuasiveness in paradigmatic and educational contexts.
To conduct the study, a corpus was constructed that consisted of 120 RAs totaling 674,984 words. The RAs were sampled from six leading international (English) and domestic (Chinese) applied linguistics journals published during a five-year period from 2009 to 2013. Drawing on Coffin‘s (2009) analytic framework that integrates multiple aspects of citation under the unifying perspective of Bakhtinian dialogism, this study identified and analyzed citations in the sampled articles with the assistance of specialized corpus instruments.
Marked cross-paradigmatic and education-related differences in citation use were identified through quantitative analyses of citation frequencies and textual scrutiny of instances of citation in the corpus. The analyses revealed that the qualitative RAs by AA tended to use dialogically expansive citations more frequently, whereas the quantitative RAs by OA and HA deployed more dialogically contractive citations. The identified citing patterns of OA, often taking a middle position between those of AA and HA, indicate a homogenizing effect of Anglophone education on citation practice in Chinese RAs. The findings are discussed in terms of epistemologies underlying different research paradigms, culturally based educational philosophy and institutional practices, the nature of cited propositions, and the homogenizing effect of academic socialization in Anglophone settings on local/regional scholarly publication. After presenting some pedagogical implications derived from the findings of this study, the dissertation concludes that citation is a textual practice which involves a strategic manipulation of multiple features to maximize persuasiveness in paradigmatic and educational contexts.
Date Issued
2014
Call Number
P53.76 Xie
Date Submitted
2014