| Academic book reviews have both an informative and an evaluative function to inform readers about new books and evaluate them.As an essential way for the disciplinary communities to trace the flow of information within and across knowledge domains,book reviews provide a platform for knowledge construction and academic communication.With the significance,book reviews have attracted little attention and are even viewed as “second class citizens of the scientific literature”,which provides more room for further study in academic genres.This study views the academic book review writing as social engagement and an expectation-based practice,which is dialogic and interactive.It is necessary for book review writers to strategically deal with their relationship with the participants in the academic writing practice.On the one hand,they need to project themselves into the book review discourses,assume what their target readers know based on their prior experiences in their disciplinary field,build and maintain the interactive relationship with their readers by means of the proper employment of the rhetorical devices,and finally achieve their communicative goals of persuading readers to accept their argument.On the other hand,they should keep the friendly relationship with other members in the same academic communities and position their argument within the wider research context by means of negotiation with their peers and intertextuality to signal their contribution to disciplinary development.Based on the understanding of academic book reviews in this way,the present study takes Motta-Roth’s(1995)adjusted model of the rhetorical pattern in book reviews and Hyland’s(2005a)adjusted model of metadiscourse as the analytical framework,focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of the generic structure and the distribution of the metadiscoursal features in the constituent moves and steps of the English and Chinese academic book reviews in a single discipline,applied linguistics,and multi-dimensionally interprets the research results from the perspectives of thought patterns,culture and pragmatics.The study intends to answer the following questions:(1)In the disciplinary conventions of applied linguistics,how do expert L1 writers in English-speaking countries strategically employ the rhetorical pattern and metadiscourse resources in academic book reviews in an international context?(2)In the disciplinary conventions of applied linguistics,how do experienced L1 writers in China strategically employ the rhetorical pattern and metadiscourse resources in academic book reviews in a national context?(3)In these two different cultural contexts,what are the similarities and differences in the rhetorical patterns and metadiscourse resources in academic book reviews?(4)How to interpret these similarities and differences presented in the same disciplinary community and in different cultural contexts from different perspectives?To answer the above-mentioned questions,we build up a corpus of 100 book reviews in the discipline of applied linguistics: 50 of them written in English by scholars based at institutions in English-speaking countries and published in international journals,and another 50 written in Chinese by Chinese scholars in national journals.In this study,the moves,the steps and the metadiscourse resourses in the book review discourses are identified and labeled manually and a mixed research methodology of quantitative and qualitative analysis,text analysis and theoretical analysis,and contrastive analysis is adopted to analyse the “move-step” pattern and the frequency of occurrence of moves and steps in English and Chinese book review discourses and metadiscourse resources in moves and steps.Similarities and differences are reported on the generic structure and the strategic use of metadiscourse features in English and Chinese academic book reviews.The similarities are as follows:(1)The rhetorical structure of English and Chinese book review discourses share similar features: They start all of their discourses with Move 1 and most of the discourses with Step 4;The phenomena of move cycling,move embedding and move reordering occur in their move patterns;Their overall organizations of book review discourses are both presented as “General(Move 1)-Particular(Move 2 and Move 3)-General(Move 4)”;the statistics suggests Step 1,Step 4,Step 5,Step 7,Step 8,Step 10 and Step 12 as their obligatory steps and Step 11 as their optional step.(2)The distribution of metadiscourse resources in book reviews’ moves and steps shares the following features: They both use rich metadsicourse resources;Interactive categories are used more than interactional ones in both corpora;Source markers including endophoric markers and evidentiality are the most pervasive interactive categories and attitude markers are the most pervasive interactional categories;Proportionally,metadiscourse resources are distributed more in Step 4 of Move 1,Step 8 of Move 2,Step 10 of Move 3 and Step 12 of Move 4;As the body parts of book reviews,Move 2 and Move 3 accommodate more metadiscourse resources.The differences of genre structures and metadiscourse features between Chinese andEnglish book review discourses are as follows:(1)Their rhetorical structures differentiate each other in the following aspects: All the four moves in English book reviews are obligatory,while in Chinese book reviews,Move 1 and Move 2 are obligatory,Move 3 is ordinary and Move 4 is optional;The frequency of moves suggests that the move patterns of English book reviews are more complex than the correspondence in Chinese book reviews;Step 3 and Step 6 are optional in English book reviews and obligatory in Chinese book reviews,on the contrary,Step 2 and Step 9 are obligatory in English book reviews and optional in Chinese book reviews;another difference lies in the usage of Step 3 with its much higher frequency in Chinese book reviews when it is concerned with the affiliated institutions of the reviewed books’ authors.(2)The distribution of metadiscourse resources bears some differences as follows:Standardized statistics reveals that English and Chinese book reviews have different rhetorical preference,the former using much more metadiscourse resources than the latter;With respect to self mention markers,English book review writers prefer the singular form of first person pronoun “I” to show their contribution to the discourse communities,while Chinese writers prefer the inclusive “we” to stress their integration into the group even when the book review discourse is single-authored.The similarities of generic structures and metadiscourse features in English and Chinese book reviews suggest that academic writing is a community-based activity,and English and Chinese book review writers belonging to the same discourse community of applied linguistics abide by the same disciplinary convention and generic convention.The exploration of the interpersonal relationship in book review discourses helps the writers to construct the dialogue with readers with their in-group identities when they properly present the rhetorical patterns and achieve their communicative purposes with the strategical employment of metadiscourse devices in “move-step” structure,which embodies their membership in book review generic communities.Their differences show that factors of thought pattern,culture and pragmatics seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their book reviews.Under these influences,book review writers from different linguistic and cultural contexts of publication exert different expectations on the potential readers’ needs,the communicative purposes and their relationship with academic discourse communities,and strategically use the generic patterns and metadiscourse resources to fulfill their particular aims.The results reported in this study have both theoretical significance and pedagogical implications.In theory,the present study provides evidence for the universality of Motta-Roth’s(1995)book review move pattern;The study on metadiscouse in the genre of book reviews which is often neglected by the academia contributes to the widening of the metadiscourse model and deepens people’s understanding of book reviews;The combination of metadiscourse resources and “move-step” is beneficial to the presentation of the book reviews’ interactivity in a more comprehensive way and offers an example to the study of other discourse types;The interpretation of research results from various perspectives places the generic structure pattern and metadiscourse pattern in cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary context.In practice,the present study helps to cultivate the generic competence of the green hands in academic writing which makes them familiar with the generic conventions of the particular discourse communities,to develop their metadiscourse awareness which provides them the devices to interact with readers,the resources to express and negotiate their attitude,and the opportunity to participate in the dialogue with particular communities,and to raise their cross-cultural awareness which enables them to be more critical and more effective in their academic reading and writing.Nowadays,English has become the “academic lingua franca” of the international academic community.In the new context,this study is helpful for the writers who may not be familiar with the writing of the book reviews to know about the writing conventions in international academic context,meet the expectations in a new cultural context,and finally facilitates the publication of their research in international journals. |
