Patterns Of Academic Criticism In English As A Lingua Franca

Academic criticism(AC)is a rhetorical variable that has recently attracted the attention of the researchers from linguistics and applied linguistics,especially those interested in academic discourse.As literature shows,most of the studies have mainly focused on the features of AC in written academic contexts,with those in oral communication contexts,oral English as lingua franca in academic settings in particular left unexplored.This comparative study attempts to explore the AC patterns in oral communication by native and non-native speakers of English in academic settings.The corpora used for comparison in this study are Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(here after MICASE)and the Corpus of English as Lingua Franca(here after ELFA),which are two highly internationally recognized free online academic spoken English corpora.The results showed there exist differences and similarities in AC usage between these two academic communities.In general,AC has occurred more frequently in ELFA than in MICASE,indicating that non-native academic researchers are more critical and authoritarian and passionate in the formulation of their AC than their native counterparts.As for the preferred AC patterns,the results indicate that there are more direct ACs in ELFA than in MICASE suggesting that ELF speakers or non-native speakers of English would like to use direct ACs(which took up 63% of all AC cases)when they perform academic criticism or academic evaluation on others' work while the native speakers prefer indirect ACs(which occupied 62% of all AC cases)to perform the similar functions.With regard to the distribution of AC rhetorical strategies the speakers in ELFA used more types of rhetorical devices than the speakers in MICASE did.The non-native English speakers showed a tendency to overuse AC devices both in a direct and indirect way than their counterparts did,especially in the usage of lexical negation,modal verbs and epistemic devices.In terms of the functions of ACs,no significant differences were found between ELFA and MICASE.ACs performed two major negative politeness functions: hedging,impersonal construction.The findings are expected to make contributions to the development of theories related to the features of spoken English as lingua franca in academic discourse.