A corpus-based investigation of the effect of nativeness and expertise on reporting practices in academic writing

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the role of nativeness and expertise level on reporting practices in writing in applied linguistics with regards to patterns of use and construction of stance. The study compares four different corpora of research papers: (1) 30 research articles that were written by native writers of English and published in native English contexts, (2) 30 research articles that were written by Turkish nonnative writers of English (3) 30 unpublished research papers written by graduate native writers of English and (4) 30 unpublished research papers written by graduate Turkish non-native writers of English. A corpus-based analysis of texts was carried out to explore the features of other-sourced research reports, that is, verb controlling that clauses used to report previous research in a study. AntConc 3.4.3 was used to extract the clauses that were analyzed in terms of subject type, reference type, reporting verbs, tense, voice and aspect, as well as the cross sectional distribution of these features.The study showed that expertise level is an important factor in disciplinary writing as native and non-native expert writers showed little variation in their reporting practices. Although both native and non-native novice writers were found to differ from expert writers considerably, remarkable differences were found between native expert and non-native novice writers. This finding indicates that nativeness status becomes less important as the expertise level increases. Furthermore, the findings support the view that non-native writing is discursively hybrid, which is more evident in novice writing.