Doctoral Dissertation Research: Uniting genre analysis and multidimensional analysis: A corpus based analysis of scientific research articles

在Jeff Connor-Linton博士的指导下，Budsaba Kanoksilapatham女士将汇编和分析一个包含60篇生物化学研究文章的语料库。这些文章将从美国出版的五种生物化学核心期刊中随机挑选。以前对科技文章中的语篇结构和语言使用的研究都强调修辞动作的交际功能(如总结先前的研究和确定研究的利基)以及一些词汇和语法特征(如过去时和被动语态)。Kanoksilapatham女士将讨论这两个层面的分析，以确定它们是如何联系在一起的。她将分析修辞语步，以确定生物化学研究文章的四个部分(导言、方法、结果和讨论)中常规使用的修辞组织，并评估语步识别的可靠性。然后，她将分析几十个词汇和语法特征的使用，以确定最常用于构建每种类型的移位的特征集。这项研究的重要性有三个方面。在实证方面，这项研究将提供迄今为止对研究文章修辞结构的最具代表性的评论。从理论上讲，这是第一次通过分析修辞语步内部和跨语步具体语言特征的使用来评估修辞语步等主观解释结构的有效性，并揭示了书面语篇中两种传达意义的方式之间的联系。在教学上，本研究可以指导语言教师和教材设计者选择课文和开展英语作为第二语言或外语教学的学习活动。来自这些分析的见解将帮助以英语为第二语言的科学家更好地理解世界各地的科学发现报告，并为其做出贡献。

Under the direction of Dr. Jeff Connor-Linton, Ms. Budsaba Kanoksilapatham will compile and analyze a corpus of 60 biochemistry research articles. These articles will be randomly selected from five core journals in biochemistry published in the United States. Previous studies of discourse structure and language use in scientific articles have emphasized the communicative functions of rhetorical moves (like 'Summarizing previous research,' and 'Identifying a research niche') and of a few lexical and grammatical features (like past tense and passive voice). Ms. Kanoksilapatham will address both levels of analysis to determine how they are connected. She will analyze rhetorical moves to determine the rhetorical organization conventionally used in each of the four sections of biochemistry research articles (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and to assess the reliability of move identification. She will then analyze the use of dozens of lexical and grammatical features to identify the sets of features that are most typically used to construct each type of move.The importance of this research is threefold. Empirically, the study will offer the most representative review of the rhetorical structure of research articles to date. Theoretically, it is the first study to assess the validity of subjective interpretive constructs like rhetorical moves by analyzing the use of concrete linguistic features within and across those moves and revealing the connection between two ways that meaning is communicated in written texts. Pedagogically, this study may guide language teachers and materials designers in selecting texts and developing learning activities for English as a second or foreign language instruction. Insights from these analyses will help scientists who speak English as a second language to better understand and contribute to reports of scientific discoveries around the world.