| 1. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
A Personalized Corpus Approach to Developing Academic English Writing Skills: Initial Experiences from an Ongoing Pilot Course
- 2009
-
In: Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP), Oslo University College, Norway, June 8-9, 2010.
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The planning and implementation of courses in EAP require the careful assessment of learner needs, and one frequently identified need expressed by EAP course participants (researchers and PhD students at Oslo University College) is the desire to improve their knowledge of discipline-specific terminology and work-related terms and phrases. This apparent need, however, cannot always be adequately addressed by an EAP instructor, whose background, experience, and knowledge are likely to differ from those of EAP course participants. In this presentation, I will show how I have attempted to address this learner-identified need, by introducing a short course in corpus linguistics designed to help researchers compile their own personalized electronic academic phrasebooks, based specifically on the research literature of their own field. The course content and proposed learning outcomes as well as initial experiences from the current pilot version of the course will be discussed.
|
|
| 2. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Analysis of the Generic Discourse Features of the English-Language Medical Research Article: A Systemic-Functional Approach
- 2012
-
In: Functions of Language. - 1569-9765. ; 19:1, s. 5-37
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Genre analysis can be used as a means of understanding the communicative practices of specific discourse communities and may therefore be of particular benefit to students in higher education for whom the interpretation and production of discipline-specific texts is paramount. This study takes global medical research as a case in point and examines the generic discourse features of the experimental medical research article (RA), using a systemic-functional and 'structural moves analysis' approach. Based on this novel, combined methodology, a sequence of generic rhetorical moves and steps across a series of medical RAs are described in terms of their function and lexicogrammar. The implications of the study are discussed in relation to previous research and their potential pedagogical and methodological applications.
|
|
| 3. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Encouraging the Production of Spoken English in EAP Courses for University Staff: A Participant-Centered Approach
- 2010
-
In: Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP), Oslo University College, Norway, June 17-18, 2010.
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Prior to attending EAP courses and when asked how they feel about being expected to contribute to group discussions in English, university staff often respond apprehensively---“I feel this is a challenging task” “A little bit nervous” “Not too happy, but I just have to do it…” This presentation addresses some of the challenges related to encouraging the production of spoken English in EAP courses for university staff. In particular, a learner-centered form of instruction is emphasized, in which the course participant’s role as expert and the instructor’s role as mediator are integral. Such an approach to EAP promotes the sharing of existing knowledge and expertise in the group, and helps create the foundation for an open exchange of ideas and experiences, regardless of language proficiency. The implications for course participants and the EAP practitioner, in both single- and multi-disciplinary groups, among academic and administrative staff, will be discussed.
|
|
| 4. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Engagement in Medical Research Discourse: A Multisemiotic Discourse-Semantic Study of Dialogic Positioning
- 2019
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study investigates how medical researchers engage with a background of prior and anticipated utterances in a collection of highly cited English-language medical research articles. Taking a multisemiotic, systemic-functional approach, I examine the verbal, visual, and mathematical resources used by medical research writers to construe, engage with, and position themselves in relation to a dialogic background of different voices, positions, and propositions. I explore the dialogic functions of those resources and how they are integrated or combined. I also consider how those resources are distributed across different parts of the medical research article and to what extent their use might reflect some of the disciplinary practices of medical research. The study shows that engagement can be realized by a broad and diverse set of verbal, mathematical, and visual resources. Verbal modality, projection, and concession, visual prominence and depiction-style, and mathematical probability, approximation, and prediction combine to construe a dialogic space that, on the whole, is more ‘heteroglossic’ than ‘monoglossic’ (i.e. multi- or other-voiced rather than single-voiced) and more dialogically ‘expansive’ than ‘contractive’; that is, it opens up rather than closes down the dialogic space for alternative positions and propositions in the discourse. From a genre perspective, engagement resources have different distributions across the various stages and phases of the medical research article, which tend to construe a dialogically ‘expansive’ Introduction and Discussion and a dialogically ‘contractive’ Methods and Results, although there is considerable variation across generic stages and phases and among individual research articles. The intersemiotic analysis shows how verbal, visual, and mathematical engagement resources are generally integrated to complement and reinforce the meanings construed by each semiotic. Less commonly, they diverge or they combine to make meanings that are not explicitly carried by any one semiotic, creating moments of potential dialogic tension. These changing dialogic spaces are crucial to building and maintaining alliances with the reader. They are also part of what makes the medical research article a hybrid text, one that, from a disciplinary perspective, construes varying writer–reader relations and knowledge structures (e.g. hard–soft, regional–singular, hierarchic–horizontal) as the text unfolds. The implications of this study are three-fold. Firstly, the study contributes to theoretical developments in the fields of social semiotics, systemic functional theory, and discourse analysis more generally. Secondly, it contributes to the growing body of discourse- and corpus-analytic studies of medicine and medical research discourse. Thirdly, the findings may have practical applications in academic literacy programmes.
|
|
| 5. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Engaging with the literature, engaging with the reader: evaluation in academic writing
- 2011
-
In: Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes (NFEAP), Oslo University College, Norway, June 9-10, 2011.
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The way in which authors engage with other voices in academic research discourse is an integral part of the social practice of communicating research. Evaluation and evaluative language play an important role in how authors engage with the literature and the putative reader, and how they position themselves and their own research within a wider disciplinary context. In this presentation, I will examine the role of evaluation in academic research writing, and discuss its potential application to EAP, including some of my own experiences from an academic writing course for researchers.
|
|
| 6. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: appraisal in a multimodal corpus of medical research articles
- 2011
-
In: International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) 32, June 1-5, 2011, University of Oslo, Norway.
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Academic discourse is dialogic, and the way in which a researcher engages with other voices in the discourse is an integral part of the social practice of communicating research. In this work-in-progress paper, I will discuss how this dialogism is realized in medical research discourse, by applying the systemic-functional framework of appraisal to a multimodal corpus of medical research articles. Specifically, I will present how the corpus has been compiled and annotated according to the system networks of engagement and graduation. I will also present preliminary findings of the discourse-semantic features identified, the probabilities of their being selected, and their distributions across the texts. Some of the challenges involved in annotating nonverbal and multimodal elements, e.g., figures and tables, as well as general challenges related to corpus-based application of the appraisal framework will also be discussed.
|
|
| 7. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Exploring the dialogism of academic discourse: heteroglossic engagement in medical research articles
- 2013
-
In: English corpus linguistics : variation in time, space and genre : selected papers from ICAME 32 / edited by Gisle Andersen and Kristin Bech. - Amsterdam : Rodopi. - 9789042036796 ; , s. 183-207
-
Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In academic research writing, the way in which an author engages with and positions him/herself in relation to other voices in the discourse, e.g. with the literature and the putative reader, is an integral part of the social practice of communicating research. Understanding how this engagement is realized may have important implications for academic literacy programs, particularly in the development of academic writing skills. In this paper, I investigate engagement in written medical research discourse, by applying the systemic-functional framework of APPRAISAL, a model of evaluative language, to a corpus of English- language medical research articles. Specifically, I present how the corpus has been compiled and annotated according to part of the ENGAGEMENT system, a subsystem of APPRAISAL dealing with writer/speaker resources for intersubjective positioning. These engagement resources include what are generally dealt with under the headings of modality, hedging, and attribution, among others, but they are interpreted here in terms of their dialogic functionality; that is, the role they play in construing for the text a background of different voices (the literature, the putative reader) and different value positions. For instance, a modal Finite such as may not only signals a speaker’s/writer’s degree of certainty or level of commitment, but, from a dialogic perspective, it also ‘entertains’ or allows for the possibility of alternative positions or viewpoints in the discourse. (Consider, for example, Reducing LDL cholesterol may reduce the development of vascular disease.) In this paper, I present the different types of engagement features and their interrelations as identified in the corpus, the probabilities of these features being selected, the frequencies of their occurrence, their distributions across the texts, and some of their typical realizations. The findings show that there is considerable variation in the types of engagement resources used as well as in their distributions, both across and within different sections of the medical research article.
|
|
| 8. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees
(author)
-
Multiplying engagement: Visual-verbal intersemiosis in an online medical research article
- 2019
-
In: Engagement in Professional Genres. Carmen Sancho Guinda (red.). - Amsterdam : John Benjamins. - 9789027202185 ; , s. 157-178
-
Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper explores how the textual voice in an online medical research article engages and positions itself with respect to other voices in the communicative context. Taking a systemic-functional, social-semiotic approach, I examine engagement intersemiotically, with regard to the deployment and integration of visual and verbal resources; interstratally, from the levels of (lexico-)grammar ('from below') and genre and ideology ('from above'); and logogenetically, as the text unfolds. The analysis suggests a text that variously opens and closes dialogic space as the textual voice seeks to (dis)align the reader with various positions construed in the text. Some of those positionings cannot be fully appreciated without an intersemiotic perspective, making it an essential part of understanding how experts engage through specialized genres. © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
|
|
| 9. |
- Fryer, Daniel Lees, et al.
(author)
-
"Not Too Happy, But I Just Have to Do It": Challenges in Using English as the Medium of Instruction
- 2010
-
In: Nordic Network for Intercultural Communication.
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Internationalization has become an integral part of higher education. This involves meetings across cultures, and a common denominator in negotiating these intercultural interfaces is the English language. English-medium teaching in the international classroom requires university teachers to reassess their teaching methods and skills, since the multicultural arena demands more than linguistic competence alone. As practitioners of English for academic purposes, we would like to foreground our own concerns in motivating staff to attend courses designed to help meet the linguistic and cultural challenges of teaching in the international classroom. We will also voice some of the concerns expressed by course participants themselves. This roundtable discussion is intended as a participatory forum for the exchange of ideas and will address some of the many challenges ensuing from English as the medium of instruction. These include teacher reluctances, ambivalences, and enthusiasms, and the pushes and pulls of facing up to the demographic flux of current university populations.
|
|
| 10. |
|
|
