Insight Series: How to create meaning for an interdisciplinary audience

“If you are communicating in an interdisciplinary context, do you consider the terms such as audience, purpose and text type? Are you aware of any linguistic conventions that are very specific to your home discipline? If you’re finding interdisciplinarity becoming a new venture for you, have you noticed any changes to your language and structure choices in the production of your research proposals, your presentations, any research papers in an interdisciplinary context? Or have you always seen yourself as being predominantly an interdisciplinary writer, interdisciplinary researcher?”

Every discipline has its own vocabulary, buzz words and points of reference but, as Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes Natasha Rust explains, moving beyond disciplinary conventions can be much more complex than ditching specific jargon.

Growing interdisciplinarity

I predominantly work with STEM students, and in the last 10 years, we’re starting to see that the affordances of our discipline (English for Academic Purposes) are actually really useful for all students, regardless of background, regardless of language status, or language proficiency, and also lecturers and researchers in terms of just being better able to understand their linguistic choices and the conventions within their discipline. And this extends to early career researchers.

In this session, I’ll cover some of the strategies to uncover the discourse and linguistic features of text in your home discipline. So, you can understand some of the ingrained aspects of your communication, and then how you’re going to either adapt or manage that within a new context.

Registers, genres and discourse

With my work, I start with thinking about those who are interacting with us, you could call this a community of practice — the linguistic term for this is register.

These can determine the language choices, and you can have quite broad registers. It is becoming a little bit old fashioned to think of ‘academic’ as a whole register, but that’s how it was seen. When you start to get narrower with the register, of physical chemistry for example, in each case you would need to consider who you are communicating with, and what kind of functions are needed.

Then we move on to the texts. And in linguistics, we’d call this genre.

These can be complete texts with one communicative purpose — for example, a primary research paper. Or we could break this down into more sub genres: a methodology section or a discussion section, and we can piece together some of the typicality of those texts.

And then that brings us down into the discourse. What language is in those text types, for those specific registers? This all leads into this idea of students, or researchers, being better able to communicate within their discourse community or disciplinary community.

With the students, we have started to look at defining interdisciplinarity, but if you look, there are different versions floating about. There are different intersections with the ideas of multi- and transdisciplinarity, so with the students I started to untangle what those mean. And this is really important, because these aspects do influence how a researcher is presenting themselves, and how they’re writing, and the kind of communities they’re trying to build.

Moves and cues

In English for Academic Purposes (EAP), we often look at moves, and moves analysis. This is the idea that within a text, there are normally a set of moves, or features that move towards the same communicative function.

Swales and Feak found that there are three moves within an introduction known as the CARS model.

Move one: you establish a territory — giving your name and context.

Move two: establish a niche — some of the meta language there would represent a gap in the research, and outline how you’re addressing that gap.

Move three: occupying the niche — really stating how you are going to address that gap with this research.

These moves don’t have to be at the sentence level or paragraph level, it could be smaller, it could be larger, but they tend to be there. There’s a commonality of those moves.

In 2002, Peacock looked at the moves within a discussion section, and they labelled the move cycles — introduction, evaluation, and conclusion. And then they explored what move patterns are there within those cycles.

In the information move, you’ve got a finding, expected or unexpected outcome, reference to previous research, explanation, a claim for the contribution or recommendation, and limitation and recommendation. These might not be all present all the time, but there did seem to be a commonality, and you can start to see whether there are any disciplinary patterns. Or, if it was in an interdisciplinary paper, how similar or how different they were, for that context.

In chemistry papers, for instance, there doesn’t tend to be a methodology section, so the information section can be much larger because of that absence. This is just an example of how we can start to work with students or researchers to see these move patterns. And it just gives a real strategy to demystify certain things.

Dressen-Hammouda then looked at features of a text that position the writer as an expert in their field. And they found that positioning yourself as an expert really related to the epistemology of the discipline. Their paper looked at geology and one move really did relate very specifically to what it means to be a geologist or what it means to have expertise in geology.

Dressen-Hammouda looked at the adjectives and adverbs of judgments, and how geologists took research or intellectual activity and linked that to the field, noticing that this is a real specific move in geology. That was implicit, there were these textual cues that made it clear the author was positioning themselves in that way.

There are also implications for interdisciplinary contexts here — are there any additional moves or extra moves in interdisciplinary texts, because of what we’re trying to do in terms of combining different expertise, or different readerships. And, as a writer, do we need to consider the move patterns of other disciplines when we start to write for different audiences?

Do we need to start thinking about how do they move forward with their genres? How do they get to that communicative purpose? Are there different cues in interdisciplinary texts to indicate expertise, and again, in interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts? Are there different cues to influence or show expertise in that area? Or that you are identifying yourself as an interdisciplinary researcher?

The moves analysis is something linguists can offer to the interdisciplinary researchers to help them really understand those patterns.

Rhetorical functions

Another thing we look at in any EAP is rhetorical functions. These are purposes that are within moves, or within texts.

These rhetorical functions include explaining; recounting; comparing; contrasting; taking a stance; drawing conclusions; and reporting.

What we do in EAP is detect disciplinary differences. In one discipline, is there more explanation than another? Is there more taking a stance in another?

And there are different levels of prominence. Taking a stance for example, in an arts and humanities context might be more at the sentence level, or a clause level, or follow up clause to a claim. In the sciences, it can be added as an adverb, or be very subtle. So, it’s important to see those differences within rhetorical functions.

We also look at the rhetorical functions of citation use among students. I think most of you are aware of this idea of integral and non-integral, but what are the reasons for the choices of citation?

We use citations to attribute knowledge, this is probably the most common use ; we use it to exemplify, for further reference — this idea of further reference being that you’re positioning yourself as an expert that knows about the texts, and you can signpost to them. There’s also statement of use, application, evaluation, establishing links and comparison of one’s own work to that of others.

In an astrophysics paper we recently looked through, we found that attribution started more generally at the beginning of the introduction, and then it moved further on to further reference. The role of citation could be quite different in different disciplines, and in interdisciplinary papers.

Another researcher looked at rhetorical functions within methodologies and found quite a difference in how the physical sciences convey their methodology to the social sciences.

In social sciences, these methodologies are more chronologically focused, and then it elaborates, whereas the physical sciences have quite a different approach. So, we should be aware of those linguistic choices we make in the methodology section and how much they are features of a home discipline, and how much the intended readership is going to be able to follow the expectations and follow the patterns.

Discourse and complexity

When we analyse and inspect the rhetorical functions, we can start to see some quite stark differences in terms of registers, and this links back to the phrasal complexity.

There is the idea that science writing tends to rely on phrasal complexity to the greatest extent, followed by social sciences. I imagine that not everyone’s quite aware of how this happens in the language.

I often get told by scientists, ‘we don’t worry about language expression, we just want it to be concise’, but it means that the author has to be more compact, and the concision has to apply at the phrase level leading to potentially more complicated terminology being used, and more jargon.

If we want to convey our research to an interdisciplinary audience, we should be aware that we’re communicating in a discipline-specific way, which comes back down to remembering your community of practice. But we can’t really be aware of register changes unless we’re aware of what we’re doing currently. Linguists and EAP practitioners can offer quite a lot of insight there.

Bridging disciplinary boundaries

We all need to make sure we’re aware that academic writing is persuasive, and it’s all about presentingyourself as credible, making sure you’ve got solidarity with your readership, and making sure we’re all very aware that we are social actors, and that our linguistic choices are going to drive a discourse community — that’s something I really want interdisciplinary researchers to bear in mind.

My colleagues, Bodin-Galvez and Ding started exploring more neoliberal aspects of interdisciplinarity, and there’s this idea that it’s all centred around a problem, and that’s characterising interdisciplinary endeavours. This idea of it being groundbreaking or breaking barriers, can be considered as an enforced rhetoric is something that we have a choice as to whether we conform to or whether we try and change that narrative, change that rhetoric.

But again, you can’t make that choice unless you’re aware of it. So, trying to be as explicit and as knowledgeable about your discourse in your subject is really good for that.

References

Bodin-Galvez, J. and Ding, A. 2019. Interdisciplinary EAP: Moving beyond aporetic English for general academic purposes. The Language Scholar, 4, pp.78–88.

Dressen-Hammouda, D., 2008. From novice to disciplinary expert: Disciplinary identity and genre mastery. English for Specific purposes, 27 (2), pp.233–252.

Peacock, M., 2002. Communicative moves in the discussion section of research articles. System, 30(4), pp.479–497.

Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. 1994. Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.