This work predicted the difficulties of Tunisian novice researchers with scientific writing by studying, in terms of Functional Linguistics, two linguistic features used in the scientific discourse: syntactic structures and hedging. This work shows the deficiency of the official programs in terms of the required skills to compile a successful scientific discourse. Results showed that Tunisian novice researchers have never seen such features during their acquisition of English. Thus, they may face the hard challenge of packaging the high content of information in such an expository discourse to reach the informative and rhetorical purpose of their scientific products.
This works predicted, by studying the deep rooted reasons behind difficulties of Tunisian novice researchers with efficient reading of the scientific genre, that difficulties are rooted in their educational system. It simulates the line of thinking of the strong version of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). The common point between the method of this work and the strong version of the CAH lies in using a predictive approach. By confusing its social and scientific status, this system neglected the importance of English in scientific communication. Furthermore, the weak programs and unskilled teachers in terms of scientific genre deepened these difficulties. Consequently, this study based on Contrastive Linguistics foresaw that Tunisian novice researchers are more than likely to fail doing the first and vital stage of the publication industry: the literature review.
This study aims at investigating the effects of discourse modes on assessing EFL learners written performances. A total of fifty raters judged sixty essays (30 narratives and 30 argumentative writing modes) written by third-year English students from the Faculty of Letters and Humanities. Raters not only scored the compositions but also justified their scores assignments based on written explanations. Raters rating behaviors were diagnosed based on a variety of quantitative and qualitative tools. Essay scores were analyzed based on the statistical model FACETS to measure raters severity and internal consistency, task difficulty, and the scale functioning across writing modes. Qualitative data (gathered from interviews and report forms) were also analyzed in order to examine which aspects of writing were deemed more important than others across task types. The analysis revealed that the discourse mode was substantially an influential factor. The narrative task was more difficult than the argumentative one. Narrative essays were judged harsher than argumentative essays. Less consistent ratings could be detected from the narrative mode, compared to the argumentative one. Qualitative findings showed that the two writing modes were different in their qualitative judgments due to their different genre requirements and norms.
Abstract:This work tried to see whether Tunisian novice researchers have taken advantage of their errors or not. By studying a case study in terms of Corpus Linguistics, it was found out that difficulties of Tunisian novice researchers lie in their unfamiliarity with error terminology and with the tradition of the corrective feedback. This lacuna is inherited from the Tunisian official programs, which have excluded this endeavour from their interests. Thus, Tunisian novice researchers could not profit from the corrective feedback either during their educational career or during the revision process of their Research Articles.
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