DALS Student’s Paper Published in Journal of Language Teaching and Research
Student Corner
A DALS student, Huang Yueyue’s paper related to her DALS study has recently been published in Journal of Language Teaching and Research.
Huang Yueyue. “A Corpus-Based Study on the Semantic Use of Reporting Verbs in English Majors’ Undergraduate Thesis Writing.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 13.6 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1306.17
The study aims to add further pedagogical insights on students’ academic writing by investigating the semantic patterns of reporting verbs (RVs) in L1 Chinese undergraduate English majors’ theses in a southern Chinese university based on the semantic categories by Hunston et al. (1996) and Charles (2006a). A comparative analysis was conducted across L2 and L1 students’ academic writing in the discipline of applied linguistics. The study yielded two major findings: 1) there was a significantly insufficient employment of RVs in general, particularly among three categories (Argue, Show, Find) by L2 students, who also presented a strong reliance on argumentation by intuition; 2) L2 students illustrated a restricted vocabulary repertoire of colloquial RVs and their usage of RVs was misrepresented in context, diverging from the intended rhetorical functions. These findings indicate that evidence-based argumentative writing practice and targeted lexical and rhetorical instructions on vocabulary knowledge require further promotion in L2 English learners’ academic writing training.
