Custom Writing Service http://StudyHub.vip/Academic-Culture---Students-And-Culture 👈

1. 1
Academic Culture – Students and culture shock. TESOL Conference in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. 28-31 March 2012.
Academic Culture – Students and culture shock
Ken Hyland
I want to look at the impact of culture on communication by taking a wider view of culture. If
we see culture as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow
us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world, then
academic communities are cultures.
In fact, each discipline has its own norms, bodies of knowledge, sets of conventions, and
modes of inquiry which comprise a separate culture. We become members of disciplines by
acquiring these specialized skills. Wells describes this as:
Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experience
that has evolved over generations and each is dependent on its own particular
practices: its instrumental procedures, its criteria for judging relevance and
validity, and its conventions of acceptable forms of argument. In a word
each has developed its own modes of discourse. To work in a discipline,
therefore, it is necessary to be able to engage in these practices and, in
particular, to participate in the discourses of that community.
Culture shock
Students have a hard time trying to adjust their language to the demands of these cultures as
they have to take on new ways of seeing the world and of talking about the world when they
get to university. These are so different to their home culture that it is like landing on another
planet. It is life on Mars. It is a culture shock.
It means learning what Scollon calls an ‘essayist literacy’. One aspect of this is that
academic writing disrupts our everyday perceptions and sets up different expectations. In our
everyday use of language, for example, we represent events as things that unfold linearly in
time and agents as accomplishing actions: people do things. This is based on the way we see
things in the world. Michael Halliday calls this a congruent representation: we call it as we
see it. Academic writing turns this ‘natural’ way of expressing meanings upside down though
an incongruent use of language. It treats events as existing in cause and effect networks,

2. 2
disguises the source of actions, foregrounds events rather than actors, and discusses meanings
defined by the text rather than in the world.
Bundles are an example. These are frequently occurring word sequences. Bundles are a key
way of shaping meanings and contributing to our sense of distinctiveness in a register. This
means that the most common 4-word bundles in conversation are very different from those in
academic discourse, as we can see here:
Most common conversation bundles Most common academic bundles
A bit of a
Are you going to
Da da da da
Do you want a
Do you want me
As a result of
as well as the
at the end of
At the same time
In terms of the
The first thing a student has to do is learn a whole new set of collocations to sound academic.
Students generally have to navigate this strange world without help from their subject tutors
who assume that English is all much the same and that students’ problems result from laziness
or defective English teaching. A few language classes will sort them out. Both students and
subject tutors fail to see that learners are struggling with a new culture and its literacy.
A number of factors contribute to this culture shock for L2 students:
(i) Student origins
Students’ first language and prior learning influence their choices when writing in English.
This is because different languages have different ways of organising ideas and structuring
arguments. Research suggests, for instance, that compared with many languages, academic
texts in English tend to:
• be more explicit about structure and purposes (previewing and reviewing constantly)
• employ more, and more recent, citations
• be less tolerant of digressions
• be more cautious in making claims (hedges dominate a lot of academic writing)
• use more sentence connectors and metadiscourse signalling generally, perhaps
supporting Hinds claim that English, in contrast to German, Korean, and Chinese, is
said to make the writer rather than the reader responsible for clarity.

3. 3
(ii) Genres
Students experience academic conventions which vary by genre. Table 1, for example,
compares frequencies for different features in a corpus of 240 research articles and 56
textbooks.
Table 1: Selected features across fields (per 1000 words)
Fields Hedges Citation Self-
citation
Transitions
Research Articles
15.1 6.9 3.9 12.8
University textbooks
8.1 1.7 1.6 24.9
• The greater use of hedging underlines the need for caution and opening up arguments in
the research papers compared with the authorized certainties of the textbook.
• The removal of citation in textbooks shows how statements are presented as facts rather
than claims grounded in the literature
• The higher use of self-mention in articles points to the personal stake of writers and their
desire to gain credit for claims.
• Transitions are conjunctions and other linking signals and they are twice common in the
textbooks as writers need to make connections far more explicit for readers with less
topic knowledge.
(iii) Assignment types
Students in different disciplines are asked to do different kinds of writing, so:
◼ chemists write lab reports
◼ computer scientists write program documentation
◼ social scientists write project reports
We also know that different fields make use of different genres, so that in their large-scale
corpus study of 30 disciplines in UK universities, Nesi & Gardner found 13 different “genre
families”, ranging from case studies through empathy writing to reports. These differ
considerably in social purpose, genre structure and the networks they form with other genres.
Even in fairly cognate fields students write quite different texts. In looking at the assignments

4. 4
given to medical students, for instance, Gimenez (2007) found that nursing and midwifery
students were given very different writing assignments. In fact, different fields value different
kinds of argument and set different writing tasks.
• In humanities & social sciences analysing and synthesising multiple sources are important
• In science and technology, activity-based skills such as describing procedures, defining
objects, and planning solutions are required.
(iv) Disciplines
Underlying most writing differences are the conventions of different fields. Simply, different
groups use language to conduct their business, define their boundaries, and manage their
interactions in particular ways so that physicists don’t write like philosophers nor lawyers like
linguists. I only have time for just three examples: lexis, hedges and self-mention.
a. lexical meanings
Perhaps most obviously, disciplines have different ways of talking about things. They
name and describe the world in different ways and this makes it difficult to identify a
common academic vocabulary. Clearly they use different content words. Table 2 presents a
quick study of chapters from 5 textbooks in applied linguistics and 5 in biology, showing
that students encounter completely different items.
Table 2: Content words in University textbooks
5 Applied Linguistics books
No. % of total Word
423 0.8663% language
149 0.3052% speech
128 0.2622% example
127 0.2601% interaction
106 0.2171% act
101 0.2069% communication
97 0.1987% students
93 0.1905% text
93 0.1905% acquisition
91 0.1864% acts
90 0.1843% face
89 0.1823% input
86 0.1761% rules
85 0.1741% communicative
79 0.1618% knowledge
5 Biology books
No. % of total Word
166 0.4304% species
150 0.3889% DNA
143 0.3708% spores
135 0.3500% organisms
117 0.3033% bacteria
116 0.3008% fungi
95 0.2463% figure
89 0.2307% organism
75 0.1945% RNA
68 0.1763% spore
62 0.1607% cells
59 0.1530% section
58 0.1504% genus
55 0.1426% cell
49 0.1270% disease

5. 5
Less obviously, a study by Polly Tse and I of an academic corpus of 4 million words, for example,
(Hyland & Tse, 2007) shows that the so-called universal semi-technical items which make up
Coxhead’s Academic Word List, actually have widely different frequencies and preferred meanings
in different fields. So:
• “consist” means ‘stay the same’ in social sciences and ‘composed of’ in the sciences.
• ‘volume’ means book in applied ling and ‘quantity’ in biology.
• ‘Abstract’ means ‘remove’ in engineering and ‘theoretical’ in social sciences.
So words which seem to be the same, have different meanings across different fields.
In her PhD study of a 6 million word corpus from economics and finance, Althea Ha identified 837
words which had a meaning specific to those fields, even if they had a general meaning too.
Ward and Muang compared items in textbooks across 5 engineering fields and found:
• gas, heat and liquid occurred almost exclusively in chemical engineering.
▪ They also found items like system, time, value and factor which were very high across all
engineering fields, but they collocated very differently, giving these words different technical
meanings (settling time, critical value, load factor).
b. Hedges
Hedges like possible, might, likely, etc. are devices which withhold complete commitment to a
proposition, implying that a claim is based on plausible reasoning rather than certain
knowledge. They indicate the degree of confidence the writer thinks it might be wise to give
a claim while opening a space for readers to dispute it.
Because they represent the writer’s involvement in a text, they are twice as common in
humanities and social science papers than in hard sciences. We find more statements like this:
The existence of such networks did not go unnoticed by contemporaries, and it
seems sensible to assume the men concerned were probably not unreflective
about this patterned conduct either. (Soc)
With hindsight, we believe it might have been better to have presented the
questionnaire bilingually. (AL)

6. 6
One reason for this is there is less control of variables, more diversity of research outcomes,
and fewer clear bases for accepting claims than in the sciences. Writers can’t report research
with the same confidence of shared assumptions so papers rely far more on recognizing
alternative voices. Arguments have to be more cautious by using more hedges.
In the hard sciences positivist epistemologies mean that the authority of the individual is
subordinated to the authority of the text and facts are meant to ‘speak for themselves’.
Writers often disguise their interpretative activities - downplaying their personal role to
suggest that results would be the same whoever conducted the research.
Less frequent use of hedges is one way of minimising the researcher’s role, and so is the
preference for modals over cognitive verbs. Modal verbs can more easily combine with
inanimate subjects to downplay the person making the evaluation.
So these are cognitive verbs as modals:
I think this would be a mistake. (Soc)
We suspect that the product used in this study may have contributed to the
result (Mkt)
And we find far fewer of these in the sciences.
These are modal verbs used as hedges:
For V. trifidum, ANOVA showed a significant increase from L to L' and FI,
which could be interpreted as reflecting the dynamics of fungal colonization.
The deviations at high frequencies may have been caused by the noise
measurements (EE)
We find far more of these in the sciences.
Scientists tend to be concerned with generalisations rather than individuals, so greater
weight is put on the methods, procedures and equipment used rather than the argument.
Modals, then, are one way of helping to reinforce a view of science as an impersonal,
inductive enterprise.
c. Self-mention
Most predictably, we find that authors in the soft knowledge disciplines intrude into their
texts through use of ‘I’ or ‘we’ almost three times more frequently than scientists. This

7. 7
allows them to claim authority through personal conviction and to emphasize their
contribution. It sends a clear signal of the writer’s perspective and distinguishes that
perspective from others.
But while self-mention can help construct an authoritative author in the humanities,
scientists generally downplay their personal role to establish the objectivity of what they
report uncontaminated by human activity. They’re concerned with generalisations rather
than individuals, and this is done by distancing the writer from interpretations in ways that
are familiar to most teachers of English, using:
The passive:
A bright spot of incident IR light was observed at the input coupling grating.
dummy it subjects:
It was found that a larger stand-off height would give a smaller maximum shear
strain…
And by attributing agency to inanimate things like tables, graphs or results:
The images demonstrate that the null point is once again well resolved.
By subordinating their voice to that of nature, scientists rely on the persuasive force of lab
procedures rather than the force of their writing.
Conclusions
Instead of concluding I want to repeat using Ballard and Clanchy’s words from the 1980s:
Just as modes of analysis vary with disciplines and with the groups that practise
them (physicists, psychologists, and literary critics), so too does language. For the
student new to a discipline, the task of learning the distinctive mode of analysis…is
indivisible from the task of learning the language of the discipline…One area of
development cannot proceed without the other.
Students success at university depends on them being able to enter a new culture, and EAP
teachers are in a good position to help them.