Explicit language knowledge used to express criticality in academic writing: Findings from genre studies

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Critical thinking is seen as an important academic skill to be fostered through writing courses, a skill that writing instructors are often expected to understand and teach. However, agreement on definitions of critical thinking as an academic attribute and on how and what to teach still remains elusive and a challenge for teachers. In this paper, I locate critical thinking as an integrated element of a writer's discourse competence and consider the types of discursive and linguistic knowledge that relate to its expression through text. To support this approach, I briefly present insights from studies of three academic genres which I specifically examined for the types of language knowledge elements used to express critical thinking (Bruce, 2020). The genres were student university essays, research article literature reviews and PhD Discussion chapters. Each genre was analysed manually in relation to the social genre/cognitive genre model that I have previously proposed (Bruce, 2008); the model contains seven knowledge elements that could potentially characterize a genre. The analysis involved recursive readings and marking up of the texts of each sample. Overall, I found that three generic elements were employed integratively to express critical thinking as part of constructing an extended argument or case across the three genres. The first was the overall organization of the text in terms of the staging of larger sections or more specific 'moves' (Swales, 1990). The second was the use of key critical statements framed by a small number of coherence relations (Crombie, 1985). The third element was the embedding within the critical statements of the metadiscourse devices of attitude markers and hedging (Hyland, 2005). These findings offer an analytical lens through which teachers and novice writers may examine these academic genres, and consider the types of textual resource that could potentially be employed to express critical thinking as part of the case-building that each requires.

Pre-recorded video :