SWALES MOVES:
The introductions of journal articles offer a natural place for scientists to shape their story. Generally, scientists use a "create-a-research-space" pattern in these introductions, as documented by John Swales, a linguist who specializes in advanced writing. According to Swales, scientists use four standard rhetorical moves to create a context for their work. First, they demonstrate the interest or importance of the research topic. Second, they selectively review and summarize the previously published research literature. Third, they show that the research is not complete, creating a "gap" in the previous research. And fourth, the current research is presented as a timely and appropriate "filler."
See if you can identify the four "Swales moves" in the following excerpts:
Example 1:
Multiple studies suggest that writers prefer audio-taped feedback on their writing to traditional, handwritten comments (Dragga, 1991; Neuwirth et al., 1994; Pearce & Ackley, 1995; van Horn-Christopher, 1995). However, these studies have primarily observed technical and business writers. Moreover, these studies have not compared students' perceptions of audio-taped comments with "live" forms of feedback, such as student-teacher conferences. To assess the possible effects of different forms of teacher feedback in a general composition setting, this study asks students enrolled in a variety of English writing courses to rank their preferences of different forms of feedback.
Example 2:
Since the late 1960’s, a growing number of studies have examined the interactions of gender and discourse in the classroom setting. While the results are not always consistent, the majority of researchers have found that male students speak more often than female students in K-12 classrooms (French & French, 1984; Sadker & Sadker, 1985b; Spender, 1982; Swann & Graddol, 1988), sometimes at a ratio of over three to one. This pattern of unequal participation between male and female students continues in the higher educational setting both inside of the classroom (Karp & Yoels, 1976; Kramarae & Treichler, 1990; Latour, 1987) and in faculty interactions outside of the classroom (Eakins & Eakins, 1978; Edelsky, 1981; West & Zimmerman, 1983). Moreover, even when women do speak up, listeners are more likely to recall comments made by men and even attribute comments made by women to male speakers (Spender, 1982). A frequently-cited reason used to explain why men so often dominate formal conversations is that women are more likely to be successfully interrupted than men (Eakins & Eakins, 1978; West & Zimmerman, 1983; Woods, 1988), although later researchers have noted inconsistencies in research on interruptions (James & Clarke, 1993; Tannen, 1993). Researchers have also found that men often fail to use assent terms to encourage and promote the conversational exchanges of others, resulting in situations where women provide a disproportionate amount of conversational support (Fishman, 1983; Leet-Pellegrini, 1980). From this extensive body of both quantitative and qualitative research, many sociolinguists and others began to describe the ways in which the subtleties of conversational norms work to reinforce lines of power that appear to favor male voices.
Much of this research on gender and discourse, however, was conducted during a period which many feminists today recognize as a period of unconscious racism in the feminist movement (Haraway, 1991; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldua, 1981). In the sixties and seventies, many feminist leaders were guilty of silencing differences among women—differences due to class, sexual orientation, or color—in the interest of providing a unified “female” voice. As a result of this unconscious bias, prior to the 1990's, the race or ethnicity of the subjects are rarely mentioned in studies on gender and discourse. Most of this ground-breaking literature on conversational interactions therefore contains little or no recognition of the possibility that the discourse patterns they describe are specific to a particular group or groups of women and not generalizable to other segments of the female population. Although most current research on classroom discourse now recognizes that ethnicity as well as gender affects students' communication styles (c.f. Henley & Kramarae, 1994), we still know relatively little about how these two variables interact to influence discourse in the classroom. Assuming that most of the subjects in the studies cited above were White men and women (the cultural “default” then as now), it is probably fair to say that scholars know a good deal about how gender and conversational dynamics interact for White students, but little about how, or even if, gender affects the participation patterns of non-White students in classroom discussions.
Example 3:
In a qualitative study involving 123 students writing arguments based on letters to the editor, Wolfe (in press) argues that giving students annotated readings can influence their perceptions of the social context of a reading-to-write task. Students receiving readings accompanied by evaluative annotations wrote argumentative essays that were less reliant on summary and more engaged with the source materials than students receiving the same readings without annotations. A follow-up study (Wolfe, 2001) lends support to these findings and further suggests that annotations reflecting the viewpoints of two readers with differing perceptions of the source materials are more influential than other types of annotations in affecting students’ argumentative activities.
However, the source texts used in these earlier studies of reading-to-write activities were short, easily digested letters to the editor. How students might respond to annotations accompanying lengthier and more academic materials is unclear. Will these annotations help students view an argumentative social context for their writing as the annotations in the earlier studies seemed to do? Or will annotations on academic materials possibly interfere with students’ comprehension and retention of the materials, as Reder (1985) suggests that elaborations sometimes do?
The current study attempts to address these questions by examining how students’ written responses to an academic essay might be influenced by the presence of accompanying annotations that evaluate the source materials….