Volume 9 (2018) Issue 2
pp. 267-272
Ken
Hyland: The Essential Hyland. Studies in Applied Linguistics. London
et al.: Bloomsbury 2018. (ISBN 978-1-3500-3789-2)
The
present, 506 page-long book comprises Professor Hyland's most
important articles on academic discourse and, especially, academic
writing. They are thematically arranged and thus present an
introduction to academic writing and also a testimonial of Ken
Hyland's contributions to this field of applied linguistics. The
utmost importance of academic writing is estimated by Ken Hyland
himself, when he states in his preface:
Through
writing, and readers' responses to their writing, individuals learn
how things should be done and acquire sets of associations, meanings
and tacit beliefs about priorities and values. (IX)
The
book is divided in five parts and 19 chapters, followed by an
extensive bibliography (463-490) and an Index (491-506). Each part
is, in addition to the articles themselves, complemented by an
introduction and a commentary by prominent scholars in the respective
fields. As the articles published here are reprints and therefore not
unknown to the academic world we will focus on these commentaries
here.
Part
One (1-105) is about “Writing, participation and Identity”. It
unites articles on Writing in the university1
(Chapter 1; 6-25) with regards to its most important vocations of
educating students, acquiring and teaching knowledge and gaining
reputation, Discipline (Chapter 2; 26-48) and its positioning
in academic contexts, Participation (Chapter 3; 49-73) of
science with respect to its relation with the (academic) community
and its expertise, and Community and individuality (Chapter 4;
74-99) on developing identity in the field of applied linguistics.
Chuck Bazerman, Professor of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of
Technology (Atlanta, USA) provides the commentary on Part One
(100-105) and generally states that Hyland's
accomplishments
in exposing the variations of different dimensions of linguistic
practices in different academic domains through corpora studies are
exemplary and set him apart from other applied linguists in their
comprehensiveness, nuance, and subtlety of understanding,
particularly in the elusive areas of identity, affiliation and
positioning. (100-101)
He
also highlights Hyland's use of interviews for rhetorical analysis
which also take the goals of the actual language producer, i.e. the
writer, into account (101).
With
respect to Chapter 1, he points to the way writing is produced within
institutions and is also determined by the practices they use. A
better understanding of these processes will not only be beneficial
for education, but also help researchers to further their careers
and, in an even broader sense, to offer access to even more reliable
knowledge.
Referring
to Chapter 2 and Hyland's considerations about the means by which
authors establish relationships with their readers and identification
in the framework of their discipline, Bazerman highlights the
necessity for writers to know what and how to write so as to stand
out in the respective academic market. For this, working with
flexible, fuzzy definitions of what a 'discipline' is has to be
preferred to sticking to a rigid definition of this notion.
In
the context of Participation
(Chapter 3), for Bazerman, Hyland's work has opened significant
phenomenological windows – a work which should be continued in the
future, with this scope being widened by research to be done upon the
discussions, processes and patterns that develop among multiple
participants in given communities (104).
Making
reference to Chapter 4, Bazerman brings up Ken Hyland's important
documentation of certain words individuals use in their respective
contexts of study and also mentions the fact that Hyland does no go
beyond documentation and does not analyse his data. Such analysis
would need to be executed and then have to go beyond the textual
level and include the various (i.e. conceptual and social) contexts
that are of relevance in a given discipline, inclusive of the
relations which these individuals have with and within their field
(104).
In
a Saussurian approach, Bazerman concludes:
Hyland's
vision recognizes that langue
is only a codification of what is deployed within parole
and comprehensive knowledge of langue alone
does not make effective users of language. (105)
Part
Two – Interaction, stance and metadiscourse
(107-204) comprises the fields Disciplinary cultures, texts
and interactions (Chapter 5;
113-133), Stance and engagement
(Chapter 6; 134-155), Metadiscourse in academic writing
(Chapter 7 (with Polly Tse);
156-178), and Change in attitude?
(Chapter 8 (with Kevin Jiang); 179-201). The commentary on Part Two
(202-204) is given by Brian Paltridge, Professor of TESOL at the
University of Sydney (Australia).
This
second part of the book deals with the relationships that academic
writers establish with their readers and the strategies they use so
as to be recognized by other representatives in their specific field.
Their writing is the direct or indirect result of the practices
approved by the members (i.e. writers and readers) of this discipline
(Chapter 5 and 204).
Stance,
which includes an author's
pronominal self-mentions (e.g. I or
we), hedges (e.g. might,
perhaps), boosters (e.g.
definitely, in fact or
clearly), and attitude
markers (e.g. surprisingly, admittedly),
is analysed in Chapters 6 and 7 (plus 202, 203). By utilizing these
strategies, writers show their awareness as to the presence of their
readers and also define their own position with respect to their
content and the framework of their discipline. Interestingly,
experienced writers seem to use hedges less frequently than academic
newcomers, as the former are longer in need to reassure themselves
that they are recognised in the academic world.
Attitudinal
changes happen when academic writers address their potential readers
differently than they used to, as was found by Hyland for writers of
research articles, who appear to present their findings in a more
impersonal way than they did in former times (Chapter 8 and 204).
Referring
to the articles in this second part of the book and addressing Ken
Hyland, Brian Paltridge rightly states:
His
metadiscourse framework, in particular, enables us to see how,
through the use of language, academic writers both present themselves
to their readers and interact with them and, in doing this, index
membership of their disciplinary communities. (204)
Part
Three covers Interactions in peripheral genres (205-280).
It encompasses articles on Constructing proximity (Chapter
9; 211-229), Dissertation acknowledgements (Chapter
10; 231-253), and The presentation of self in scholarly
life (Chapter 10; 254-276). Part
Three is commented on by Vijay K. Bhatia, Adjunct Professor at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong (277-280).
Chapter
9 deals with establishing rhetorical proximity between writers and
readers in academic papers on the one hand and adaptations of these
in reformulated popular versions on the other. Bhatia
hints to the difference that Hyland's research makes as compared to
studies conducted by other researchers, in that he goes beyond mere
corpus analysis and analyses issues like the management of expertise
in academic text types or provides supplementary explanations (278).
The same is true for the communication between science and society,
which, in Hyland's approach, also exceeds traditional corpus analysis
(ibid.).
With
regards to dissertation acknowledgements (Chapter 10), for Bhatia,
Ken Hyland's most important merit is to have found out that academic
gratitude is by no means expressed for personal reasons only, but
that the ways in which it is presented vary in different
sociocultural and disciplinary contexts (278).
Chapter
10 deals with the presentation of scholars on their academic
homepages, i.e. those provided by their respective universities and /
or academic institutions, by which both the scholar's individual
academic identity and his or her visibility in the academic world are
displayed. The genre academic homepage thus combines a
scholars' self-marketing with the requirements of his or her
institution. Bhatia implicitly states that Ken Hyland's merit is to
have combined rhetorical genre analysis with corpus analysis and
applicable ethnographic procedures (279). With reference to the third
part of this book, Bhatia, quasi in a bird's eye view, characterises
Ken Hyland's academic development as follows:
So
if we see the three chapters in terms of analytical rigour, they are
strategically situated in a sequence that illustrates Hyland's
progression from somewhat pure corpus analysis to a multidimensional
analysis integrating corpus analytical work with ethnographic
analytical procedures all within the genre analytical framework.
(280)
Part
Four is about Features
of academic writing
(283-386) and includes Academic
attribution (Chapter
12; 286-314), Self-mention
in research articles (Chapter
13; 315-335), Academic
vocabulary (Chapter
14; 336- 354), and Lexical
bundles and disciplinary variation (Chapter
15; 355-381). The commentary on this part (382-386) is provided by
Diane Belcher, Professor of
Applied
Linguistics and English as a Second Language at Georgia State
University (Atlanta, USA).
With
respect to academic attribution, i.e. “Citation and the
construction of disciplinary knowledge” (Chapter 12 and 383-384), a
field which had not been thoroughly explored by then, just like
in other studies of his, Ken Hyland employed a mixed-methods
approach, with corpus tools utilised to analyse eighty research
article across eight highly different disciplines, combined with
insight into different disciplinary practices offered by experts who
acted as his informants. According to Belcher, and not only to her,
an important finding was that the differences between the hard and
soft sciences were particularly remarkable, with the latter
displaying more citations in general, more author-oriented citations
and more discourse-oriented reporting (as opposed to research-action)
verbs. Belcher gathers from these findings that the use of citations
be taught in terms of the understanding of and the participation in
the creation of disciplinary knowledge, and not just as a way to
avoid plagiarism, thus attributing the art of citation the place it
actually deserves.
Extending
his approach to the phenomenon of self-citation, also using a
mixed-method approach and a new corpus being three times as large as
his previous one (Chapter 13 and 384), Ken Hyland found self-mention
to be more frequent in the soft disciplines. Self-citation, however,
was found to be most prevalent in biology, as a hard discipline, most
probably due to the fact that in the hard sciences, a scientist is
often one of the very few, or even the only one, to conduct research
in that particular field. Among the methodological implications
Hyland deduces from his findings is that rhetorical reading helps
students identify the common practices in their respective
disciplines. There seems to be a space for self-reference in any
field, but the very practices depend on the making of meaning and
people's interaction in the particular disciplinary community.
In
an attempt to answer the question of whether there is such a thing as
'academic vocabulary', Hyland and Polly Tse scrutinised the
methodology and pedagogical weight of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word
List (AWL) (Chapter 14 and 385). On the basis of a 3.3-million word
corpus and including eight (hard and soft) disciplines, they found
that only around one third of the word families listed in the AWL
were relatively frequent in their own corpus. In addition to this, a
given word identified in this corpus may have different meanings when
used in (academic) texts, which would relativise the value of the AWL
even more. The AWL can, as the authors concluded, therefore not be
employed as an easy tool for the writing of academic texts.
Moving
from the purely lexical level to the paradigmatic one, Ken Hyland
researched upon Lexical
bundles and disciplinary variation
(Chapter 14 and 385-386), thus widening his scope of interest towards
the combination of words. Based on a cross-disciplinary corpus of 3.5
million words, he found that the composition
of lexical bundles dissimulated the author's presence in the hard
disciplines and that the most important function
of bundles was to emphasise writers' interpretations. At any rate,
more research is needed to help writers build some awareness of the
styles employed in their respective disciplines.
In
general view, Belcher's estimation seems to be realistic when she
states:
Taken
together, what emerges from the four studies just discussed, as in
much of Hyland's other work, is an 'academic discourse' whose
features are far more varied and indicative of profoundly different
ways of seeing and understanding the world than the term itself,
especially facile use of it, would seem to suggest. (386).
Part
Five deals with Pedagogy and EAP
(387-461) and comprises Genre-based pedagogies (Chapter
16; 392-403), Nurturing hedges in the ESP curriculum
(Chapter 17; 404-418), Praise
and criticism in written feedback (Chapter
18 (with Fiona Hyland); 419-447), and Specificity revisited
(Chapter 19; 448-458). This part is commented on by Ann Johns,
Professor at the Department of Rhetoric & Writing Studies at San
Diego State University (USA) (459-461).
In
Chapter 16, Hyland gives his response to 'process', arguing that
writing is much more than just a set of cognitive processes: as a
rapport-building activity, it represents (at least) a complex mixture
of elements that include the writer, the reader(s), the situation,
the purpose of writing, and the wording (403).
The
pedagogic ideas that Hyland develops on teaching the use of hedges
(Chapter 17 and pp. 411) – as those elements in scientific texts
that serve to develop academic arguments and to build a relationship
with readers – are rather practical and consist in awareness
raising by analysing given texts together with students and in having
them perform writing tasks so as apply hedging to practice.
Teachers'
criticism of student writing is the topic in Chapter 18, where, which
is also stressed by Ann Johns, Hyland holds that indirect feedback
can lead to misunderstandings and, thus, be counterproductive (444).
Giving blunt critical feedback may not in every case be an easy task
for teachers to perform, but it may lead to better results in the
long run.
The
last chapter of the book is a reprints of an article that adds to the
argument started by Peter Strevens in 1988, in which Hyland
stipulates that the teaching of English for Specific Purposes has to
be differentiated from Teaching English for No Obvious Reason. In
this context, Hyland asserts that
effective
language teaching in the universities involves taking specificity
seriously. It means that we must go as far as we can (458) –
a
statement which is of utmost importance for the teaching of foreign
languages in the future, not only in university contexts.
In
sum, we can state that the book reviewed here represents an important
publication as Ken Hyland's work on academic writing is very nicely
and handily arranged here. Although all the papers collected here had
been published before, readers interested in the questions raised in
them do not have to search for them at long and at large, but have
them at their disposal in form of a representative publication which
also gives further weight to Ken Hyland's research.
This
representative character of the present book is impressively
supported by the five commentators, all outstanding scholar in their
respective fields, who give the book a “personal touch' and also
contribute to what is very important to Ken Hyland, i.e. to build
rapport with him and, in so doing, with his readers.
The
high technical quality of the book, in good Bloombsury tradition,
also symbolises the importance of the research fields outlined here.
Writing may not be one of the most frequently practised activities in
the foreign language classroom, where speaking and the teaching of
the linguistic inventory (grammar and vocabulary) are still in the
lead. Yet, it is certainly on the uptake, in view of the deliberate
use of computers and devices like Google Docs in the context
of classroom activities. What is more, writing is of eminent value
when it comes to understanding the esprit of a given foreign
language, and, in contrast to oral communication, it offers students
the chance to meditate on language use and usage without being put
under time pressure.
What
can be said about writing in general can all the more be formulated
for academic writing in particular: academic writing is not only of
value for the academic world but, in extension, also for many areas
of the professional world, where native or non-native language users
will have to provide summaries of lengthy texts for their superiors,
give presentations of ambitious content that needed to be prepared in
form of written texts, or even ghost-write their boss's talk to be
given at an important company event. This means that (academic)
writing represents one of today's key skills for long-term
professional success in the academia and also the professional world.
This also means that Ken Hyland's work is not only of interest for
the (comparably small) group of academically ambitious university
students, but also for those who aim to hold an important position in
the economy one day.
To
cut a long story short, The Essential Hyland is a handbook
which covers highly relevant issues of academic writing and which
will certainly enjoy continuous success.
Reviewer:
Professor
Thomas Tinnefeld
Applied
Languages
Saarland
University of Applied Sciences
14,
Waldhausweg
66123
Saarbrücken
Germany
1Only
the titles of the respective papers or their subtitles (if
more expressive) are quoted here, not both.