Furthering and applying move/step constructs: Technology-driven marshalling of Swalesian genre theory for EAP pedagogy

Abstract

John Swales' seminal work has inspired a wealth of research with important pedagogical implications for genre-based writing instruction. Continuing the prolific move analysis tradition in EAP research, this article presents empirically devised and validated cross-disciplinary IMRD move/step frameworks for the research article genre and demonstrates how Swales' move and step concepts underlying these frameworks formed the foundation of innovative genre-based automated writing evaluation technology. Overall, this paper makes the relationships between genre theory, genre analysis, and genre instruction explicit, demonstrating that move analysis is a powerful and promising theoretical, analytic, and teaching construct. With that, we take Swales' vision to a new dimension of conceptualizing EAP. Keywordsgenre analysis, move, step, genre-based writing pedagogy, automated writing evaluation, research writing Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Curriculum and Social Inquiry | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational MethodsComments NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of English for Academic Purposes. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, [19, (2015) AbstractJohn Swales' seminal work has inspired a wealth of research with important pedagogical implications for genre-based writing instruction. Continuing the prolific move analysis tradition in EAP research, this article presents empirically devised and validated cross-disciplinary IMRD move/step frameworks for the research article genre and demonstrates how Swales' move and step concepts underlying these frameworks formed the foundation of innovative genre-based automated writing evaluation technology. Overall, this paper makes the relationships between genre theory, genre analysis, and genre instruction explicit, demonstrating that move analysis is a powerful and promising theoretical, analytic, and teaching construct. With that, we take Swales' vision to a new dimension of conceptualizing EAP.

Applying the Bundle–Move Connection Approach to the Development of an Online Writing Support Tool for Research Articles

“…For example, Cotos et al. () retrieved high‐probability n ‐grams representative of each move and step in various disciplines and used them for the Research Writing Tutor technology. This suggests that n ‐grams can be used to identify linguistic realizations of moves and steps, because they allow commonly occurring keywords, phrases, and discourse markers to be detected (Anthony & Lashkia, ).…”

“…The results of their study suggested that the Mover could be used to help users, particularly L2 scientists and engineers, better understand and construct research papers in different fields and disciplines. Another recent development in the automated move-based technologies is the Research Writing Tutor, developed by Cotos (2014Cotos ( , 2016 and her colleagues (Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2015). The Research Writing Tutor is a pedagogical tool for teaching and learning disciplinary research article writing, which aims to advance genre-based writing instruction to the next level by incorporating an automated writing evaluation program (i.e., the Research Writing Tutor identifies move and step boundaries automatically and uses them as criteria for automated feedback).…”

“…Both the Mover and the Research Writing Tutor use n-grams, which are contiguous sequences of words (or sequences of n lexical items), as a means to identify move and step boundaries. For example, Cotos et al (2015) retrieved high-probability n-grams representative of each move and step in various disciplines and used them for the Research Writing Tutor technology. This suggests that n-grams can be used to identify linguistic realizations of moves and steps, because they allow commonly occurring keywords, phrases, and discourse markers to be detected (Anthony & Lashkia, 2003).…”

“…To tag moves and steps from different disciplinary fields, an automated tagging system is currently under development. As the main value of the bundle-move connection approach can be found more in its practical application, we are also considering the possibility of using the move-step framework of the Research Writing Tutor (Cotos, 2014;Cotos et al, 2015). This program has an established move-step framework for 30 different disciplines and automated tagging system for these moves and steps, thus allowing us to avoid reinventing the wheel.…”

Studying disciplinary corpora to teach the craft of Discussion

“…Our methodology is described in detail in Cotos, Huffman, and Link (2015); here, we summarize it in Figure 1. In short, we first conducted an inductive analysis and pilot annotation of a sample of 150 texts (5 from each discipline), and that resulted in specific move and step descriptors, which were refined based on the feedback provided by the disciplinary consultants.…”