Towards the Synergy of Genre- and Corpus-Based Approaches to Academic Writing Research and Pedagogy

Introduction

Decades of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing research have emphasized the “dynamic complexity of discursive practices” (Bhatia, 2015, p. 9) by highlighting the intentions and choices of writers, as well as the expectations of discourse community members. Such research has drawn on various methodological approaches but is particularly associated with rhetorical move-step analysis of writers’ communicative goals and corpus analysis of recurring patterns of linguistic features. A substantial portion of this research has focused on research article (RA) writing, in large part due to the increasing importance for scholars around the world to publish their research in English language academic journals (Curry & Lillis, 2004) and the understanding that the RA represents “a high stakes game upon which hiring, promotion, and continued employment can depend” (Belcher, 2007, pp. 1-2) in the academic world.

EAP writing pedagogy is motivated by the complexity and significance of EAP research writing for novice and established scholars. The notion of writing development itself has expanded beyond formal knowledge of language (Polio, 2017) and/or rhetorical knowledge in isolation. Rather, developing genre competence for participation in disciplinary genre practices entails development and integration of rhetorical and formal knowledge dimensions (among others), as highlighted in Tardy’s (2009) multidimensional model of genre knowledge development. There have been calls for the “integration of genre analysis and corpus-based investigations” (Flowerdew, 2005, p. 5) in genre-based analysis of academic writing practices, and a number of scholars have begun to respond by implementing move-based genre analysis and corpus approaches (e.g., Cortes, 2013; Durrant & Mathews-Aydınlı, 2011; Le & Harrington, 2015; Lim, 2010; Lu, Casal, & Liu, 2020; Omidian, Shahriari, & Siyanova-Chanturia, 2018; Yoon & Casal, 2020a).

However, research addressing the “function-form gap” (Moreno & Swales, 2018, p. 41) in large-scale, systematic ways is scarce in EAP writing scholarship. Furthermore, many extant integrated analyses privilege corpus-based approaches over move-step analysis by assigning move-step codes to decontextualized extracted features, perhaps due to the considerable time commitments involved in manual analysis (Flowerdew, 2005). This paper addresses this paucity by proposing and outlining a framework for EAP corpus-based genre analysis that covers corpus compilation; qualitative rhetorical and functional coding and annotation; corpus-based linguistic analysis and annotation; and integrated rhetorical-linguistic pedagogical and assessment applications.