3.3.1 Academic discourse and discourse community
Much discussion is related with the definition of academic discourse(e.g.,Rose,1985;Bartholomae,1986;Bizzell,1982;Harris,1989;Elbow,1991;Zamel,1993).Zamel(1993:187)defines academic discourse as the a“specialized form of reading,writing and thinking done in the‘academy’or other schooling situations”.Bartholomae(1986:4)defines academic discourse as peculiar ways to know,select,evaluate,report,conclude and argue that define the discourse of our community.Qin(2011:34-35)divides the analysis of academic discourse into four periods chronologically.The earliest research of English academic discourse starts in the 1960s,focusing on the formal registers of linguistic resources(e.g.Barber,1962;Halliday,Strevens & McIntosh 1964).In the 1970s,the focus of the investigation of academic discourse shifts to the research of the genre analysis and the communicative purposes of discourse(e.g.Hoey,1983;Swales,1990).From the 1990s to now,this analysis mainly focuses on L2 writing(Silva,1993),contrastive rhetoric(Mauranen,1993b,Conner,1996,Ventola,1997)and cross-cultural variations(Raimes,1994).
The research of academic discourse is closely related with discourse community,which is a controversial topic.According to Harris(1989:15),discourse community is drawn from the philosophical idea of“interpretative community”(e.g.,Fish,1980)on the one hand and the sociolinguistic idea of“speech community”(e.g.,Bloomfield,1933;Labov,1972;Hymes,1974)on the other hand.Interpretative community mainly refers to the general viewpoints or disciplines while speech community refers to specific groupings such as nations,tribes,classrooms,etc.Porter(1986)goes a step further to connects intertextuality with discourse community by postulating that in a community the members share the allusions and conventions.
Starting from the perspective of genre analysis,Swales(1990:24-27)defines discourse community as social-rhetorical networks in which the members share the common information and goals within specific genres.By analyzing the students’compositions,Bizzell(1982)articulates inner-directed and outer-directed types of writing.She points out that the inner-directed type emphasizes the universal or isomorphic writing style taught in the university while the outer-directed type focuses on the conventions in discourse communities where the students or other writers can deconstruct better ways to understand the communities outside of their own.Bizzell(1982)criticizes the inner-directed type for looking for an all-encompassing model of writing and points out the necessity to find the various standards in the discourse communities.Being similar to Bizzell(1982),Beaufort(1997:522)pays attention to the importance of individuals,who influence the discourse community with their idiosyncratic purposes and skills as writers.
Although it is necessary to pay attention to the individual differences in the discourse communities,Bizzell(1982:219)points out that the audience in a discourse community should share their expectations in the discourse conventions rather than only rely on their personal preferences or prejudices.Qin(2011:37)concludes that an academic discourse community“represents characteristic features of expectations and practices that are enacted in a discourse.”It is influenced by common communication values of the members and distinguishes itself in terms of its specific discoursal conventions from other discourse communities.For example,EAPs of different disciplines(e.g.N,S and H)can be considered as three discourse communities,in which the members,i.e.,the authors and the readers,should share similar expectations and knowledge compositions;otherwise this could lead to unsuccessful academic communication and exchange of scholarship.
Therefore,based on the above introduction and explanation,academic discourse community in the dissertation is defined as a community in which a specific groups such as authors and readers will express their individual preferences and share the basic conventions and practices at the same time.That is to say,authors and readers will not have the opportunity to meet each other but they can choose to think much like another.The notion of discourse community therefore provides a method to understand the shared expectations and practices of a particular disciplinary field and thus helps authors and readers learn how to communicate with each other in the community.
In a discourse community,or a culture(Okamura & Shaw,2005),there are also subcultures(Taylor & Chen,1991),or“sub-communities”such as disciplinary community,the academic communities comprising writers with different L1s,etc.The following two sections will deal with the two sub-communities.