Presentation on Intertextuality in academic and non-academic texts: What are the sources and outcomes for EAP writers?

Description

Intertextuality in its broadest sense—the relationship between two texts—is a pervasive feature of academic writing, as manifested by features such as citations to earlier texts and the sets of features such as structure and organisation which are shared by texts in a given genre and/or academic discipline. Many of the intertextual features of academic writing, such as the choice of reporting verb and verb form, have been thoroughly researched and described (e.g., Charles, 2006; Shaw, 1992). Much is also know about a specific, highly problematic form of intertextuality: plagiarism (e.g., Pecorari & Shaw, 2012). However, less attention has been given to the ways in which novice academic writers become aware of conventional intertextual practices, and less still to the transferability of this feature to writing in the workplace. This paper will present the results of a corpus-based investigation of intertextuality in two domains: the leisure-time reading which lower-division undergraduates do, and a common workplace genre. By triangulating the results from these two corpora with existing findings about the intertextual features of academic texts it will be possible to describe the extent to which these features overlap with, or diverge from, each other. This will thus provide an indication of the features which can reasonably be expected to transfer from one domain to another, and which cannot, and should therefore be the subject of explicit instruction in the English for Specific Academic Purposes classroom. References Charles, M. (2006). The Construction of Stance in Reporting Clauses: A Cross-disciplinary Study of Theses. Applied Linguistics, 27, 492–518. Pecorari, D. & Shaw, P. (2012). Types of student intertextuality and faculty attitudes. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21, 149–164. Shaw, P. (1992). Reasons for the correlation of voice, tense and sentence function in reporting verbs. Applied Linguistics, 13, 302–319.

Period	20 Apr 2013
Held at	BALEAP