3.3.2 Disciplinary community
Hyland(2009:8)points out the importance of the concept“discipline”in EAPs because people are sensitive to the ways the EAPs are written and the readers’responses in the social community.In his research(Hyland,2009:8),disciplines are considered as particular,recognized and familiar ways of employing language to contact and engage with others.
Discipline is defined as“a branch of knowledge or learning”in the dictionary(Agnes,2004).In the dissertation,disciplines could be considered as academic communities in which the authors should obey the writing conventions and methodologies while the readers should be qualified with the relevant knowledge about the disciplines.Hyland(2009:8)considers disciplines as“the language using with the conventions of communities”and the term helps us join authors,texts and readers together.According to Wells(1992:290),each discipline develops its own discursive pattern which is dependent on its own instrumental procedures,criteria and conventions.
Deriving from his two long-term empirical investigations,Becher(1994)aims to draw attention to the distinctive disciplinary differences of various disciplines in higher education.He considers one discipline as one tribe with its name or territory in which the people have similar ways to construe their knowledge and could understand,more or less each other’s culture and conventions.
As to the classification of the disciplines,based on the nature of subject-matter of research,Biglan(1973)lables four clusters of disciplines:hard pure,soft pure,hard applied and soft applied.Starting from the perspective of the styles of the intellectual inquiry,Kolb(1981)divides the disciplines into four types:abstract reflective,concrete reflective,abstract active and concrete active.Becher(1994:154)identifies the four clusters of Biglan(1973)and Kolb(1981)with natural science,the humanities and social sciences,the science-based professions and the social professions,and sketches a general comparison of the four clusters of disciplines.For example,hard-pure disciplines such as physics are competitive,gregarious,politically well-organized,task-oriented with high publication rate.Soft-pure disciplinary groups such as history are individualistic,plurastic,loosely structured and person-oriented with low publication rate,resulting in understanding or interpretation.Hardapplied disciplines such as technologies are entrepreneurial,cosmopolitan,dominated by professional values,and role oriented,resulting in products or techniques.Soft-applied disciplines such as education are outward-looking,uncertain in status,dominated by intellectual fashions and power-oriented,resulting in protocols or procedures.
This current research divides the disciplinary groups into three traditional divisions of academy:natural sciences,social sciences and humanities,which roughly correspond to hard-pure disciplines,soft-applied disciplines and soft-pure disciplines.Bazerman(1981)points out that in social sciences and humanities,the author-presence is inevitably weak in that the author is only the vehicle for finding the actual resources while in natural sciences there is strong author-presence in that the author establishes authority by interpreting rather than representing the evidences.
Different disciplinary communities have their own disciplinary nature and conventions,therefore EAPs of different disciplines will display disciplinary differences,which is named as“loose amalgamations pursuing different objectives in different manners”(Bucher & Strauss,1961).Becher(1989)points out that disciplinary groups can be considered as academic tribes in which the members share their characteristic intellectual values,beliefs,laws and practices.
Becher(1994:151-163)explores the differences among various disciplines on the macro-level,meso-level and micro-level,and investigates the implication of such distinctions for higher education research.On the macro-level,the external environment,the access problems and the labour market for graduates of various disciplines are explained.For example,hard pure disciplines such as physics and chemistry can get more funding support and have more chances to contact with the world.Comparatively,the tendency of soft pure disciplines is towards individualised work,and therefore they are weak in forming a bridge to the world outside.On the meso-level,the disciplinary differences are dealt with institutional management,employee evaluation,the design of the curriculum and so on.On the micro-level,the practices in research and teaching in different subject areas are illustrated.
Hyland(2009:7)points out that the study on language variation across the disciplines is rapidly becoming one of the dominant paradigms in EAPs(e.g.Hyland,2004;Fløttum et al.,2006;Hyland & Bondi,2006).The current study focuses on the disciplinary comparison of the use of CMs in the EAPs.The selection of CMs reflects the conventions in different discourse communities such as the methods,the knowledge types,etc.