This paper discusses epistemic modal verbs as rhetorical markers of argumentation in Ghanaian scholars' research articles (RAs) in the disciplines of Sociology, Economics and Law, and compares the results with similar features in RAs produced by international scholars who are native speakers. In this study, corpus linguistics methods are used to investigate the extent to which Ghanaian scholars' use of epistemic modal verbs differs from international scholars' use of these devices in terms of depth of use, diversity of use, phraseological patterns and degrees of epistemic strength. Statistically examined results show considerable differences in the use of epistemic modal verbs between the two groups of scholars across the disciplines studied, suggesting that the writing practices of the Ghanaian scholars do not fully adhere to international disciplinary conventions. In the conclusion, the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study are discussed.
A key rhetorical unit in the thesis, the literature review has in recent times received some interest by specialists and researchers of English for Academic Purposes, academic literacy, discourse analysis, and assessment. The present study reports the perceptions of graduate supervisors regarding students’ engagement with thesis literature review writing, focusing on students’ challenges and strategies faced and adopted respectively. Semi-structured interviews were administered to nine (three each) supervisors from three Humanities departments from one public Ghanaian university. The results showed, first, supervisors’ awareness of thesis literature review writing as pivotal and, second, challenges such as reading and comprehension of texts, exercising criticality, synthesizing, referencing, and language use. Further, supervisors identified graduate students’ key coping strategies such as summarizing, paraphrasing, patchwriting, concept mapping, and guidelines from supervisory interactions. These findings have implications for the scholarship on supervisors’ perceptions concerning postgraduate students’ literature review writing in a region least featured in the literature as well as postgraduate pedagogy and further research.
This study discusses the phraseological pattern It + V-link + ADJ + That Clause as a rhetorical feature of argumentation in Ghanaian scholars’ research articles (RAs) across the disciplines of Sociology, Economics and Law. It looks at the pattern’s occurrence with the adjectives possible, likely and clear in RAs by Ghanaian authors based in Ghana and in RAs by international scholars who are native speakers to determine potential divergent patterns of use between the two groups of scholars in the three disciplinary fields. Because RAs produced by non-native writers are often said to be characterized by overuse, underuse or misuse of rhetorical features (e.g., Martinéz, 2005, Englander, 2006), this study adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate the extent to which Ghanaian scholars’ use of the above collocational pattern involving possible, likely and clear differs from international scholars’ use of the pattern in terms of frequency information, levels of epistemic force, and intensification/mitigation styles. A close inspection of a million-word corpus of RAs, supported by robust statistical analyses, reveals considerable differences in the way the pattern is used between the two groups of scholars across the disciplines studied, which suggest that Ghanaian scholars do not fully apply the preferred stereotypical uses of the pattern found in reputable international RAs. The study has implications for how Ghanaian scholars have acquired rhetorical strategies of academic writing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.