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Jonas Saldanha Prof Dr Marlia Ferreira Tpicos de Semntica (FLM0523) June 2013

#6469060 FFLCH USP DLM Department of English

The distance among academic discourse communities has become shorter and shorter as technology advances and communication brings scientists closer worldwide. As a result of such shift, the social, economic and cultural spheres of nations have been exposed to other communities which did not share many social and scientific values that they do at the present moment. Another consequence of these changes is the growing need in academia for the developing of academic personnels skills in the lingua franca of science, the English language. Despite of the scientific effort that researchers in the field of Applied Linguistics have been doing to solve issues regarding proficiency of experienced and emergent scholars working in other scientific fields, a number of studies have revealed that there is still much to do so as to disentangle the question of why people from different cultures write differently and how applied linguists can assist non-native scientific discourse communities overcome barriers that impede them to thrive in academia, through networking building and publishing. De Rezende and Hermais (2004, 134) hypothesizes that differences in the way writers from diverse backgrounds compose research articles which is one of the main means of disseminating scientific findings stem from the fact that they come from different cultures. The dissimilar cultural practices that underlie the social behavior of speech communities reflect on the fashion that members of such communities engage in written social practice. In a paper in which introductions in Portuguese (written by Brazilian scholars) and English (which in their turn were written by native and non-native writers) are analyzed in light of the CARS model created by Swales (1990), Hirano (2009) compares the building of the Introduction section in research articles published in two English for Specific Purposes journals (one Brazilian, The Especialist, and another American, English for Specific Purposes). In so doing, Hirano selects twenty research articles from those journals and goes on to bring into higher relief the variations that occurred in the texts of the examined in the study.

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As a rule (but with only 2 exceptions), the articles written by Brazilian scholars do not comprise move two of the CARS model, in other words, the authors of the introductions do not include sentences that would be useful to establish a niche in the field of study. Move two is of paramount importance for academic writing in Anglophone written conventions on account of the opportunity that they create for scholars to find faults with research that has been done until the moment that she/he is writing their arguments. In order to drive her point home, Hirano reports that the data analyzed in the paper there were major differences in the rhetorical organization of the introductions written in Brazilian Portuguese and English. To the author, the differences found would have to be attributed to cross-linguistics/cross-cultural reasons. (2009, pp. 244) And what is more, Hirano presents more three possible causes for the absence of move two in the texts she analyzed, namely i) the hypothesis that, since the realm of Applied Linguistics was yet to be consolidated in Brazil, the discipline had not been, until the moment of the composing of the text, fully developed, and, therefore, there would not make much sense to struggle for room among the scholars already working in the field; ii) there is also the possibility, according to Hirano that, as the discourse community was quite small back then, little competition would be going on among Brazilian scholars in Applied Linguistics. But nevertheless, the reason that the author believes to be the most reasonable is that the Brazilian scholars who produced the articles act in academia according to solidarity towards other colleagues who are part of their own local research community. Hirano resources to Jogthongs work (2001) to suggest that writers whose texts were examined (similar to those taking part of Jogthongs study in Thailand) are more prone to avoid direct criticism on the work of others (72). In a nutshell, Hirano remarks that the Brazilian authors tended to rhetorically sidestep exposing fissures in the studies of their scientific community, whereas all of their counterparts who wrote in English included move two into their introductions, thus choosing not to preserve other authors faces. Hirano calls attention to the risk that Brazilian scholars may unwittingly take of obtaining low interest and/or appreciation from the international community and journal editors/peer-reviewers for not following long established conventions of the international discourse community, since academic writing must be critically adapted in response to the context of publication and readership.

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References:

de REZENDE, Patrcia Almeida (Programa de Ps Graduao, Depto. de Letras PUC-RIO) & HEMAIS, Barbara (Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do Rio de Janeiro). ANLISE COMPARATIVA DE ARTIGOS CIENTFICOS DA REA DE SADE Contrastive Analysis of Scientific Articles in the Area of Health the ESPecialist, vol. 25, n 2 (131-152) 2004 ISSN 0102-7077

HIRANO, Eliana. Research Article introductions in English for specific purposes: A comparison between Brazilian Portuguese and English. English for Specific Purposes, 28 (2209) 240 - 250