On some text-organizing devices in Master's theses written by Czech university students
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation discusses the ongoing process of the increasing internationalization of all scholarship and the crucial role of English as the lingua franca of academia while stressing that authors from different cultural backgrounds and intellectual traditions have to achieve a certain level of academic literacy in English if they wish to be accepted in the international academic community. That is why different types of academic discourses have to be learned by novice non-native writers as part of their “secondary socialization” (Mauranen et al. 2010: 184). Since courses in written fluency in academic English take place mostly at educational institutions such as universities, the presentation focuses on certain features in the writing habits of advanced students of English from one Central European discourse community, the Czech Republic. The aim is to discover whether Czech university students as novice non-native writers of English are able to express semantic relations between segments of discourse appropriately and in accordance with Anglo-American academic style conventions. Owing to the crucial importance of clear and convincing argumentation and support of the author’s standpoints in all academic discourse, certain most important semantic relations between segments of discourse tend to be expressed overtly by certain text-organizing devices. These language phenomena are mostly labelled discourse markers and an appropriate knowledge of them is usually included among the language features taught and practised in courses of academic writing at universities. |
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