Teaching Theme choice in Literature Reviews to Undergraduate Students

Abstract

The research applies a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) approach to analyse and then teach academic language of the IMRD (Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion) type structure in the social sciences, and specifically the literature review section in the field of the sociology of sport. Using NVivo 12, corpus analyses of the module’s six published articles from ranked journals (14,777 words) from the sociology of sport as well as student drafts (15, 949 words) were conducted and comparisons made. Students’ texts differed considerably in their use of Theme for authorial stance development, and specifically attribution. With these findings, a text deconstruction was conducted in class to raise students’ awareness of the linguistic choices possible for Theme. The paper provides evidence from the intervention. Following students’ redrafting of their literature reviews, another corpus analysis of students’ texts was conducted, and the post-intervention texts (corpus size of 15,334) compared with the students’ originals. Students’ use of Theme resources for attribution clearly developed from the input session in terms of both range and frequency of circumstantial Adjuncts and projecting clauses employing reporting verbs (VTHAT) structures. This demonstrated a move away from solely employing information-fronted linguistic resources for attribution. The paper therefore shows how SFL can be concretely used by English for academic purposes (EAP) educators.