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Variation in academic discourseRecent insights into academic writing have shown considerable variation in text characteristics across fields, languages, and cultures. Major as well as subtle differences were noted in style preferences, and on various levels of form and content organization. A number of such discoursal phenomena are discussed in this volume, and ample evidence can be found in other sources in the area of research into academic communication patterns.Among the most notable differences are field-and culture-bound disparities in global organization schemata of texts. These include divisions within text space, their labeling and sequencing. Texts have been found to vary in the degree of explicitness and metadiscoursal guidance as to what meanings have been, are, or will be communicated. They have been shown to differ in redundancy levels and in the amount of background that is sanctioned in establishing relevance relations between ideas. Differences in the use of structural resources and rhetorical devices have also been pointed out.If experimental sciences are prone to show more similarities in textualization patterns, writings in the humanities and social sciences evidence more prominent variation. In these research fields, communication styles respond most strongly to language-and culture-bound discoursal preferences and constraints. It is this kind of academic discourse we will focus on in the following discussion of the human properties behind variable text characteristics.

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The paper addresses the discourse domains of academic writing in English and Polish using the example of school writing. The English argumentative‐expository essay is related to its potential counterpart in Polish. Incongruencies between the two genre prototypes are examined in terms of cultural emphases, text characteristics and educational traditions. An integrated approach is adopted in which user‐centered and text‐centered parameters are correlated. To drive the issue home, an empirical project was devised in which Polish students were asked to perform a task that subverted the regular expectations of school writing in their native tongue.

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The intersection of cultural studies and analysis of academic discourses is today drawing more and more attention among linguists, educationists, and professional researchers in many disciplines. Among the reasons for this are: transformations in the philosophical stance regarding language, texts, and communicants; increase in cross-cultural contacts and growing awareness of the role of language in disseminating knowledge and in giving meaning to relations among individuals and groups; changes in educational views and policies, including in particular advancements in genre-based pedagogy for native and nonnative writers in research and academic settings. Intellectual, practical, and social considerations conspire to imbue such issues with profound scientific and social relevance.The current state of the art in the field of contrastive academic rhetoric would not have been possible without a change of perspective on language and the nature of scientific communication. Natural language has long been seen as an enemy of scientific exposition. This has not made it any easier to view academic writing in communicative terms, let alone in a cross-cultural perspective. The main problem was -and is, for that matter -the delicate nature of the field of science and scholarship: the sacrum of knowledge and truth is at the mercy of a medium that is profane, and a user who is fallible. For the sake of scientific purity and veracity, a plain and impersonal language was recommended -a language devoid of emotional and interpersonal meanings, of fuzzy expressions, and of intellectual or attitudinal bias. All this contributed to the image of a dehumanized language of science, and likewise to the image of a dehumanized writer/reader. Since people acting as scholars were expected to separate the scientific from the human, uniformity of academic writing styles was taken for granted, and was accounted for in terms of objectivized research standards.The emergence and subsequent rapid development of modern text linguistics and discourse analysis envisaged the communicative potential of the language of science as well as its variation across fields and cultures. The line and the pace of such renewed interest in academic communication patterns was strongly influenced by the general evolution of processual, strategic, dynamic, and interactive models of discourse organization Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University Authenticated Download Date | 6/17/15 11:07 AM 2 Anna Duszak and discourse processing. Focus on language was superseded by focus on text and discourse characteristics that were then correlated with human properties.Within the last ten years or so extensive work has been done on academic discourse patterns in mono-and multicultural contexts. Cross-cultural variation has been noted in at least the following areas of discourse organization: global and local structures in texts; levels of explicitness and metatextual cuing; degrees of redundancy and distribution of salience; and linearity and complexity in form and conten...

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