Reporting Verbs in Results and Discussion Sections of Scientific Research Articles of Hard and Soft Disciplines

Subject Areas : Research in English Language Pedagogy

Fereshte Dehghan ¹ , Hossein Saadabadi, Motlaq ² , Seyed Foad Ebrahimi ³

1 - English Language Department, Bushehr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bushehr, Iran
2 - English Language Department, Bushehr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bushehr, Iran
3 - English Language Department, Shadegan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shadegan, Iran

Received: 2022-11-20 Accepted : 2023-04-08 Published : 2023-10-01

Keywords: Corpus Study, Research Articles, Results and Discussion Sections, Reporting Verbs,

Abstract :

Reporting Verbs have gained considerable attention in corpus-based studies during the previous years. It is necessary to utilize reporting verbs appropriately to establish the writer’s claims and situate them across formerly published studies. Given the importance of the reporting verbs, the current study explored the rates and the differences of reporting verbs across science disciplines. Hence, a total number of 200 Results and Discussion sections of research articles consisting of 50 excerpts from the four science categories introduced by Science Direct web of science, namely Life Science, Social Science and Humanities, Physical Science and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the corpus and analyzed based on Thomas and Hawes's framework. The results showed that authors in Life Science and Health Science used more reporting verbs in comparison to the other two science disciplines. Furthermore, the tentative reporting verbs had a higher frequency than certainty reporting verbs. The research findings have several implications for novice researchers within various science disciplines in reporting their claims using reporting verbs and for course designers to treat crucial problems of the students in their academic writings.

References:

Abasi, A. R., & Graves, B. (2008). Academic literacy and plagiarism: Conversations with international graduate students and disciplinary professors. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 7(4), 221-233.

Agbaglo, E. (2017). The types and the frequencies of reporting verbs in research articles written by lecturers in a Ghanaian university. Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, 34, 51-57.

Atkinson, D. (2004). Contrasting rhetorics/contrasting cultures: Why contrastive rhetoric needs a better conceptualization of culture. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 3(4), 277-289.

Bloch, J. (2010). A concordance-based study of the use of reporting verbs as rhetorical devices in academic papers. Journal of Writing Research, 2(2), 219-244.

Docherty, P. (2019). An exploratory study in the use of direct quotation by L2 entry level Bachelor students. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 40, 26-40.

Doró, K. (2014). Citation practices in EFL undergraduate theses: A focus on reporting verbs. Lingua Franca Csoport Pécs.

Fløttum, K. (2012). Variation of stance and voice across cultures. In Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 218-231). Springer.

Flowerdew, J., & Forest, R. (2009). Schematic structure and lexico-grammatical realization in corpus-based genre analysis: The case of research in the PhD literature review. Academic writing: At the interface of corpus and discourse, 15-36.

Flowerdew, L. (2005). An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: Countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for specific purposes, 24(3), 321-332.

Halliday, M. A. (1993). The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Writing science: Literacy and discursive power, 86-105.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective.

Hirvela, A., & Du, Q. (2013). Why am I paraphrasing?: Undergraduate ESL writers’ engagement with source-based academic writing and reading. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(1), 87-98.

Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (2000). Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford University Press, UK.

Hyland, K. (1999). Academic attribution: Citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Applied linguistics, 20(3), 341-367.

Hyland, K. (2000). Hedges, boosters and lexical invisibility: Noticing modifiers in academic texts. Language awareness, 9(4), 179-197.

Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of pragmatics, 34(8), 1091-1112.

Hyland, K. (2018). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hyland, K., & Salager-Meyer, F. (2008). Scientific writing. Annual review of information science and technology, 42(1), 297.

Kanoksilapatham, B. (2005). Rhetorical structure of biochemistry research articles. English for specific purposes, 24(3), 269-292.

Lee, J. J., Hitchcock, C., & Casal, J. E. (2018). Citation practices of L2 university students in first-year writing: Form, function, and stance. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 33, 1-11.

Li, Y. (2006). A doctoral student of physics writing for publication: A sociopolitically-oriented case study. English for specific purposes, 25(4), 456-478.

List, A., & Alexander, P. A. (2019). Toward an integrated framework of multiple text use. Educational Psychologist, 54(1), 20-39.

Maggio, L. A., Meyer, H. S., & Artino, A. R. (2017). Beyond citation rates: a real-time impact analysis of health professions education research using altmetrics. Academic Medicine, 92(10), 1449-1455.

Manan, N. A., & Noor, N. M. (2014). Analysis of reporting verbs in Master's theses. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 134, 140-145.

Parkinson, J. (2013). Adopting academic values: Student use of that-complement clauses in academic writing. System, 41(2), 428-442.

Petrić, B. (2012). Legitimate textual borrowing: Direct quotation in L2 student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(2), 102-117.

Sakita, T. (2021). Reporting discourse, tense and cognition. Brill.

Shaw, P., & Pecorari, D. (2013). Types of intertextuality in Chairman’s statements. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12(1), 37-64.

Shuart-Faris, N., & Bloome, D. (2004). Uses of intertextuality in classroom and educational research. Information Age.

Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J. M., & Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge university press.

Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2019). What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018. Scientometrics, 121(3), 1635-1684.

Thomas, S., & Hawes, T. P. (1994). Reporting verbs in medical journal articles. English for specific purposes, 13(2), 129-148.

Thompson, G., & Yiyun, Y. (1991). Evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers. Applied linguistics, 12(4), 365-382.

Wong, L. L. (2019a). Implementing Disciplinary Data-Driven Learning for Postgraduate Thesis Writing. Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice.

Wong, L. L. (2019b). Implementing disciplinary data-driven learning for postgraduate thesis writing. Specialised English, 195-213.

Yakhontova, T. (2006). Cultural and disciplinary variation in academic discourse: The issue of influencing factors. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 5(2), 153-167.