reporting verbs in some articles on language research by english and vietnamese authors

2018-2020 (I) MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY ENGLISH LANGUAGE M.A THESIS REPORTING VERBS IN SOME ARTICLES ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH BY ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE AUTHORS Động từ tường thuật số báo nghiên cứu ngôn ngữ tác giả người Anh người Việt NGUYỄN THỊ THẢO NGUYỄN THỊ THẢO Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01 Hanoi - 2020 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY M.A THESIS REPORTING VERBS IN SOME ARTICLES ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH BY ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE AUTHORS Động từ tường thuật số báo nghiên cứu ngôn ngữ tác giả người Anh người Việt NGUYỄN THỊ THẢO Field: English Language Code: 8.22.02.01 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế Hanoi - 2020 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I, the undersigned, hereby certify my authority of the study project report entitled REPORTING VERBS IN SOME ARTICLES ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH BY ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE AUTHORS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in English Language Except where the reference is indicated, no other person‟s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis Hanoi, 2020 Nguyễn Thị Thảo Approved by SUPERVISOR Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế Date:…………………… i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to those who give me support and assistance in completing this thesis First and foremost, I am indebted to my supervisor Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Quế for his valuable guidance, encouragement, insightful advice, and constructive feedback throughout the entire period of writing the thesis I‟m deeply grateful to my family who always give me love, care, and unconditional support I also wish to thank my colleagues at Nguyen Duc Canh high school, in particular a special thanks to Mrs Khanh, the Head Master of the school who supported and encouraged me throughout the years This work would have never been possible without any of you ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Certificate of originality i Acknowledgements .ii Table of contents iii Abstract .vi List of tables and figures vii Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aim and objectives of the study 1.3 Research questions 1.4 Methods of the study 1.5 Scope of the study 1.6 Significance of the study 1.7 Structure of the study Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Previous studies on reporting verbs in academic writing 2.1.1 Studies focusing on categories of reporting verbs 2.1.2 Studies focusing on tense usage of reporting verbs 10 2.1.3 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used in different disciplines 12 2.1.4 Studies focusing on reporting verbs used by different groups of authors 13 2.1.5 Studies focusing on comparisons in the use of reporting verbs by English native and non-native English authors 16 2.1.6 Studies focusing on reporting verbs in different languages in a comparison with English 17 2.1.7 Studies on reporting verbs in Vietnamese setting 18 iii 2.2 Reporting verbs 19 2.2.1 Definition of reporting 19 2.2.2 Reporting verbs in academic writing 21 2.3 Patterns and denotation functions of reporting verbs 22 2.3.1 Integral and non-integral citation patterns 22 2.3.2 Denotation functions of reporting verbs 23 2.4 Summary 25 Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY 26 3.1 Research approach 26 3.2 Methods of the study 26 3.3 Data collection and data analysis 27 3.3.1 Data collection 27 3.3.2 Data analysis 28 3.4 Summary 30 Chapter 4: REPORTING VERBS USED IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE RESEARCH ARTICLES 31 4.1 Patterns where reporting verbs occur 31 4.2 Frequencies analysis of reporting verbs 33 4.3 Denotation functions of reporting verbs 38 4.3.1 English verbs used in denotation functions 38 4.3.2 Vietnamese verbs used in denotation functions 41 4.3.3 Comparison between English and Vietnamese verbs in denotation functions 44 4.4 Summary 48 Chapter 5: CONCLUSION 49 iv 5.1 Recapitulation 49 5.2 Concluding remarks 50 5.3 Limitation of the research 50 5.4 Recommendations and suggestion for further research 51 REFERENCES 52 APPENDICES I A Categories of common reporting verbs according Hyland‟s (2002) framework I B Corpus of the study .II v ABSTRACT This study analyzes similarities and differences in the use of reporting verbs in research articles between Vietnamese and English authors in their native language in terms of frequency and denotation functions of reporting verbs following Hyland‟s (1999) framework The corpus of the study consists of thirty research articles in Linguistics written by English and Vietnamese authors in the period from 2010 to 2015 Fifteen of the articles were written in English, by native English speakers and published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes The other fifteen articles were written by Vietnamese authors in Vietnamese and published in Language & Life Magazine 93 different verbs with 415 instances in the English corpus and 67different verbs recorded 183 occurrences in the Vietnamese corpus are found Generally speaking, both English and Vietnamese authors are fully aware of functions of reporting verbs in academic writing However, English authors use more reporting verbs than Vietnamese authors Regarding denotation functions of reporting verbs in Hyland‟s (1999) framework, reporting verbs from Research Acts category are employed more frequently in the English corpus than in the Vietnamese corpus, but Cognitive Acts verbs occur in the Vietnamese corpus more frequently Findings of this study can be used as a basis for investigating why Vietnamese learners of English use reporting language differently compared with native speakers of English, and also can shed light on pedagogical implication of teaching academic writing to Vietnamese learners of English vi LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 2.1: Common reporting verbs in Research Acts category 23 Table 2.2: Common reporting verbs in Cognition Acts category .24 Table 2.3: Common reporting verbs in Discourse Acts category .24 Table 3.1: Details of the two corpora 27 Table 3.2: Word and citation counts in the two corpora 28 Table 4.1: Frequency of reporting verbs in the two corpora .34 Table 4.2: Top reporting verbs in the two corpora 34 Table 4.3: Reporting verbs occurred only once in the two corpora 38 Table 4.4: Distribution of English verbs in denotation function 39 Table 4.5: Distribution of Vietnamese verbs in denotation function 41 Table 4.6: Comparison in the use of English and Vietnamese verbs 44 Table 4.7: Distribution of English verbs in other studies 45 Table 4.8: Comparison in the use of Chinese and Vietnamese verbs .47 Figure 2.1: Classification of reporting verbs by Thompson & Ye (1991) Figure 2.2: Classification of reporting verbs by Hyland (2002) .10 vii Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale Nowadays, although much of the research throughout the world is carried out by researchers who are not native English speakers, their scientific findings are mostly reported in this language As a result, English academic writing is a skill much needed by many researchers who are not only non-native English speakers but also native ones It is proposed that academic writing follows a certain rhetorical, grammatical, and stylistic patterns for developing the general semiotic system to have effective scientific discourse In the last few decades, there has been a great amount of interest in the study of academic writing whose focus covers the studies of genre, content, grammatical complexity, lexical diversity to more specific language features such as modality, redundancy In academic writing it will often be necessary to refer to the research of other authors and to report on their findings This process of referring to previous studies is called citation Citation is a rhetorical device that plays a key role in academic writing It indicates that the author understands the previous works, makes the author as a member of the disciplinary community, and helps the author to promote his/her research In order to citation, researchers have to use reporting verbs which is considered as one of the most crucial components in citation process The difficulty with using reporting verbs is that there are many different verbs, and each of them has slightly different and often subtle shades of meaning As the theory implies, the variation of the use of reporting verbs indicates that reporting verbs used in research articles carry out different function and communicative purposes The appropriate choice of reporting verbs in citation is crucial not only in establishing the author‟s own claims but also in situating these claims within previously published research Hyland (1999, 2002) considered reporting verbs as one of the lexical devices that researchers need for expressing their stance in an academic paper and aligning themselves with readers In this perspective, reporting verbs in academic writing might be seen as rhetorical attributions that are used to help authors‟ convince readers that authors‟ claims are significant and reasonable Moreover, by learning how to use reporting verbs in citing works of other authors properly, it can help authors to avoid plagiarism The verb đề cập is used to talk or write about something briefly and without going into detail while giải thích is to make something clear or easy to understand by describing or giving information about it The verb phát biểu is used to present something definitely or clearly in speech or writing These three verbs đề cập, giải thích, and phát biểu are equivalent to the verbs mention, explain, and state which are verbs connected with verbal expression That is why đề cập, giải thích, and phát biểu are classified in the Discourse Acts group The other verbs in Table 4.5 can be analyzed similarly We proceed with study of proportion of each group in the whole As indicated in Table 4.5, it is evident that reporting verbs from the Discourse Acts category had the highest occurrence (85 occurrences), representing 57.04% of the total reporting verbs identified in the Vietnamese data This is followed by the Research Acts category which recorded 33 occurrences, representing 20.80% of the total occurrences of reporting verbs in the data As in the English corpus, the Cognitive Acts verbs had the lowest number of occurrences (31 occurrences), which is 20.81% of the total number of reporting verbs recorded in the data Also, in the Discourse Acts category, the reporting verb that had the highest number of occurrences was đưa (16 occurrences), while cho had the highest number of occurrences in the Cognitive Acts category (10 cases) The verbs nghiên cứu, xem xét, and phân chia have the highest occurrences in the Research Acts category Each of them had five occurrences 4.3.3 Comparison between English and Vietnamese verbs in denotation functions In this section we shall compare the use of English and Vietnamese reporting verbs in the two corpora Table 4.6: Comparison in the use of English and Vietnamese verbs Verb groups English corpus Vietnamese corpus Research Acts 37.00% 22.15% Cognitive Acts 1.22% 20.81% Discourse Acts 61.78% 57.04% 44 Table 4.6 shows a striking difference in the use of reporting verbs in the English corpus and Vietnamese corpus Generally speaking, it is found that authors in English corpus use more Research Acts verbs than authors in the Vietnamese corpus However, Cognitive Acts verbs are used more frequently in Vietnamese corpus than in English corpus The frequencies of Discourse Acts verbs in the two corpora are similar, 61.78 % in the English corpus and 57.04% in the Vietnamese corpus It is also found that proportion of Research Acts and Cognitive Acts verbs in the Vietnamese corpus are similar (22.15% verse 20.81%) while in the English corpus Research Acts verbs were used more frequently than Cognitive Acts verbs (37.00% verse 1.22%) It is observed that authors in Vietnamese corpus tend to use mental verb cho (it is equivalent to believe in English) which recorded highest occurrences in this corpus As can be seen, both in the English and the Vietnamese corpus Discourse Acts verbs are more frequent than Research Acts verbs and Cognitive Acts verbs, which show the importance of argument and interpretation in linguistics However, the higher frequency of Research Acts verbs in the English corpus when compared with the Vietnamese corpus could suggest that, while both Vietnamese and English authors prefer to ground their claims on the cited authors‟ reporting of and interpretation of their own research, Vietnamese authors are less willing to emphasize the research results of cited authors The reason of this difference could be explained by the selected corpora Articles in the English corpus were collected from Journal of English for Academic Purposes which publishes papers in theoretical studies where Research Acts verbs often occur, while articles in the Vietnamese corpus were from Vietnamese Language and Life Magazine which publishes studies that look at how linguistics can help understand real-life problems in which Cognitive Acts used more frequently Table 4.7: Distribution of English verbs in other studies Verb group Hyland (1999, 2002) Manan & Noor (2013) Loan & Pramoolsook (2015) Agbaglo (2017) Luzón (2018) Research Acts 30.5% 44.8% 28.42% 42.0% 34.36% Cognitive Acts 10.5% 30.2% 8.68% 6.5% 5.45% Discourse Acts 59.0% 25.0% 62.90% 51.5% 60.18% 45 The distribution of reporting verbs in our English corpus is consistent with Hyland‟s (1999, 2002) finding as shown in Table 4.7 Hyland (1999, 2002) indicated that in Applied Linguistics Discourse Acts verbs were prominent, accounting for 59.0%, ranked second were Research Acts, followed by Cognition Acts (30.5% and 10.5%, respectively) Our findings are also in tandem with those of Loan & Pramoolsook (2015), Agbaglo (2017), and Luzón (2018) in which similar results were obtained The agreement between this finding and those of Hyland (1999, 2002), Agbaglo (2015), and Luzón (2018) could be explained by the fact that they all focused on research articles written by experts The finding, however, contradicts that of Manan & Noor (2013) where the verbs in the Research Acts category recorded the highest frequency of occurrences (44.8%), followed by the Cognitive Acts category which recorded 30.2% of the total reporting verbs identified in the data, and Discourse Acts category, which had the lowest percentage (25%) This contrasting result may be attributed to the different levels of education in involved in the two studies: the present study involves experts whereas the previous study involves graduate research students The proportion of Discourse Acts category in the whole in our finding is similar to this of Hyland‟ (1999) result (55.97% verse 59%) Research Acts verbs in our English corpus were used more frequently than in Hyland‟s (1999) corpus (42.81% verse 30.5%) and Cognitive Acts verbs are used less than in Hyland (1999) (1.22% verse 10.5%) The reason of this inconsistence between present study and Hyland‟s study may lie in the corpus Hyland‟s (1999) corpus is research articles in applied linguistics journals that publish research into language with relevance to real-world issues where authors tend to use more Cognitive Acts verbs Whereas research articles in our English corpus are theoretical studies in which research verbs often occur The distribution of Vietnamese reporting verbs in our corpus is in agreement with distribution of Chinese verbs in social sciences of Zhang (2008) As shown in Table 4.8, reporting verbs in Discourse Acts category occur much more frequently in our corpus and Zhang corpus, approximately 60% of the total of the forms Research Acts verbs and Cognitive Acts verbs share similar occurrences, about 20% of all forms As Zhang (2008, p 24) indicated that authors in Chinese corpus tend to use cognitive verb RENWEI (it is equivalent to think in English) more frequently Similar to that Vietnamese authors use frequently the verb cho which 46 equivalent to believe in English The reason of this similarity could be explained by that Vietnamese and Chinese share a certain similarity in linguistic and culture Table 4.8: Comparison in the use of Chinese and Vietnamese verbs Verb group Vietnamese verbs in our corpus Chinese verbs in social sciences (Zhang, 2008) Research Acts 22.15% 18.7% Cognitive Acts 20.81% 19.8% Discourse Acts 57.04% 61.5% Hyland & Tse (2005: p 60) suggest that academic authors use Reporting verbs strategically to focus on a specific type of support for their own claims: “By framing evaluations with either a research, cognitive, or discoursal focus, authors can also implicitly signal whether they intend their judgments to be understood as grounded in research practices, interpretive practices, or reporting practices” Hyland (2009) found a clear preference for Research Act verbs in the hard disciplines and for Discourse Act verbs in the soft disciplines and attributed it to the differences in the way knowledge is constructed: with the hard disciplines emphasizing the importance of experimental results to support claims and the humanities relying on the strength of arguments and on the reference to the words of previous researchers Hyland (2002, p 126) claims that the greater use of Discourse act verbs characterizes the discursive nature of soft disciplines in which explicit interpretation, speculation and arguments are considered as “accepted aspects of knowledge” Finding in this study confirms the trend of using Reporting verbs in applied linguistics by Hyland (1999) and Hyland (2002) Reporting verbs not simply function to indicate the status of the information reported but the author‟s own position in relation to that information The selection of an appropriate reporting verb allows authors to intrude into the discourse to signal an assessment of the evidential status of the reported proposition and demonstrate their commitment, neutrality or distance from it This is evaluation functions of reporting verbs which were already mentioned in Chapter However, this is not the purpose of the present study to investigate these functions 47 4.4 Summary This chapter offered a detailed analysis of reporting verbs used by English and Vietnamese authors in their linguistics research articles written in native languages The analysis was followed by a classification of reporting verbs relying on Hyland‟s (1999) framework This section attempts to summarize main findings gained from this chapter The analysis of the two corpora show that English and Vietnamese authors use all different citation patterns in research articles which suggests that both groups of expert authors share genre knowledge concerning the function of the different citation patterns in research articles in their discipline The study has revealed that variation regarding the use of reporting verbs in academic writing Generally speaking, both English and Vietnamese authors are fully aware of functions of reporting verbs in academic writing However, English authors use more reporting verbs than Vietnamese authors Texts written by English researchers displayed a higher number of different verbs compared to Vietnamese authors Regarding to the frequency of reporting verbs, English authors use about 38 reporting verbs per 10,000 words but Vietnamese authors use only 22 reporting verbs per 10,000 words It is also indicated that English authors use approximately 28 reporting verbs per paper while Vietnamese authors use only 12 reporting verbs per paper The findings also indicate that all the three process types of reporting verbs identified by Hyland‟s (1999) framework were used in the research articles examined in the data In the English and Vietnamese corpus Discourse Acts verbs recorded the highest occurrence, followed by Research Acts verbs and Cognitive Acts verbs It is found that authors in English corpus use more Research Acts verbs than authors in the Vietnamese corpus However, Cognitive Acts verbs are used more frequently in Vietnamese corpus than in English corpus The frequencies of Discourse Acts verbs in the two corpora are similar It is also found that proportion of Research Acts and Cognitive Acts verbs in the Vietnamese corpus are similar while in the English corpus Research Acts verbs were used more frequently than Cognitive Acts verbs 48 Chapter 5: CONCLUSION 5.1 Recapitulation The present study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of reporting verbs in articles on language research between English and Vietnamese authors in terms of frequency of reporting verbs, denotation functions of reporting verbs following Hyland‟s (1999) framework The corpus for the study comprised 30 papers in which 15 were written in English and 15 were in Vietnamese The study shows that for both corpora there is considerable use of reporting verbs in reporting previous researches However, although the corpus analyzed is not large enough to make confident generalizations, the study has revealed some similarities and differences in the way these two groups of authors used reporting verbs in their linguistics research articles, which allows for some tentative conclusions The study has revealed that, native speakers of English authors use 93 different reporting verbs in citations while Vietnamese authors employ 67 different reporting verbs in their papers Regarding to the frequency of reporting verbs, English authors use approximately 38 reporting verbs per 10,000 words but Vietnamese authors use only 22 verbs per 10,000 words It is also indicated that English authors use approximately 28 reporting verbs per paper while Vietnamese authors use only 12 reporting verbs per paper Moreover English authors greatly favored of the verbs find, argue, note, suggest, describe, and show while Vietnamese authors display preference for the verbs cho rằng, đưa ra, ra, đề cập, đề xuất, and giải thích Verb find (38 cases) emerged the reporting verb that recorded the highest number of occurrences in the English corpus while cho recorded the highest frequency of occurrence in the Vietnamese corpus Analyzing the data based on Hyland‟s (1999) framework, it was found that English authors used all the three kinds of reporting verbs in varying proportions In the English corpus reporting verbs from Discourse Acts category has the highest percentage of occurrence (55.97%) This followed by Research Acts category which recorded 42% of the total occurrences of reporting verbs in the English data The Cognitive Acts category has the lowest number of occurrences which recorded 1.22% of the total number of English reporting verbs Similarly, in the Vietnamese corpus Discourse Acts verbs recorded the highest occurrence (57.04%), followed by 49 Research Acts verbs and Cognitive Acts verbs recorded 22.15% and 20.81% respectively 5.2 Concluding remarks Based on the analysis on the use of reporting verbs in the two corpora, some concluding remarks are given First of all, the study revealed that all kinds of patterns in integral citation and non-integral citation where English reporting verbs occur are also found in the Vietnamese corpus This similarity suggests that both groups of expert authors in linguistics share genre knowledge concerning the function of the different citation patterns in research articles in their discipline Secondly, concerning the use of reporting verbs, authors of English corpus use more reporting statements than authors of Vietnamese corpus which is shown by the numbers of reporting verbs used and occurrences recorded in the two corpora Thirdly, regarding denotation functions of reporting verbs in Hyland‟s (1999) framework, reporting verbs from Research Acts category are employed more frequently in the English corpus than in the Vietnamese corpus, but Cognitive Acts verbs occur in the Vietnamese corpus more frequently, the frequencies of Discourse Acts verbs in the two corpora are similar Although, there are some evidences of differences in grammatical subject and verb choice, it is concluded that both groups of authors were aware fully the function of reporting verbs to make an effective use of them to achieve the goals of their disciplinary cultures 5.3 Limitation of the research Although this study provided a detailed analysis of using reporting verbs by Vietnamese authors in a comparison with English authors, there are several limitations of the study that need to be pointed out It is essential to consider the limitation of using corpus-based linguistics as methodology Concerning the corpus used in the present study, due to time constraints we can only consider thirty articles in two particular journals Because of the smallness in corpus size and the loss of diversity in journal, the finding may hardly be representative to account for the general development of use of reporting verbs of Vietnamese authors Secondly, this study focuses only on several aspects of reporting verbs; some other important aspects such as evaluation functions, tenses, voice and forms are not included in this paper Note that tense and voice of reporting verbs also indicate the author‟s stance towards the reported research as pointed out in Chapter Another limitation specific to the present study was the lack of interview data which would presumably 50 have an impact on the results Lastly, the English articles are chosen and downloaded from the internet according to the authors‟ names and affiliations Even though the bio-data of authors at the end of articles and information of authors in the websites of their universities were checked, it cannot ensure that the English articles are written by authentic native speakers of English 5.4 Recommendations and suggestion for further research In practical terms, recommendations are put forward in regard to possible ways to fit the explicit teaching of reporting verbs into the Research Methodology course as well as to promote effective learning To begin with, teachers and instructors can address the significance of reporting verbs at the very beginning of the course by emphasizing their functions in academic writing and directing students‟ attention to their evaluative potential and how they are integrated into texts In this regard, reporting verbs are made salient and students are likely to focus more on the meaningful elements when they are doing academic reading and writing during which their knowledge of reporting verbs can be built up and consolidated There are a few suggestions for further study that other researchers can address in this area First, using a larger corpus together with different data (such as interview data) may help material developers and researchers to come up with a clearer picture on the similarities and differences in the use of reporting verbs between Vietnamese and English authors The second suggestion of the author is to investigate some other important aspects of reporting in academics by Vietnamese authors such as evaluation functions, reporting adjuncts, reporting adjectives, and reporting nouns since they are excluded in the present study Researchers can also try to design studies on reporting verbs in Vietnamese articles in different disciplines and see how authors in those disciplines report previous results 51 REFERENCES Agbaglo, E (2017) The types and the frequencies of reporting verbs in research articles written by lecturers in a Ghanaian university Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, 34, 51-57 Amrullah, Q L., Munir A & Suharsono (2017) Rhetorical functions of reporting verbs in author prominent citations of graduate students‟ research papers Journal of English Language and Literature, 8, 690–700 Bašić, I (2017) Reporting Verbs as Evidentials in Research Articles in English and Croatian Doctoral thesis, University of Zagreb Croatia Berhail, S (2017) A Corpus Based Analysis of the Use of Reporting Verbs in Master Dissertations Master thesis, Larbi Ben M'hidi University-Oum, Algeria Bloch, J (2010) A concordance-based study of the use of reporting verbs as rhetorical devices in academic papers Journal of Writing Research, 2, 219-244 Hawes, T & Thomas, S (1997) Tense choices in citation Research in the Teaching of English 31, 393-414 Hoang, T U (2018) A Study of Signal Functions of Reporting Verbs in English and Vietnamese Master thesis, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam Hyland, K (1999) Academic attribution: citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge Applied Linguistics, 20, 341-367 Hyland, K (2002) Activity and evaluation: Reporting practices in academic writing In J Flowerdew (Ed.), Academic discourse London, Longman, 115-130 Hyland, K (2009) Writing in the disciplines: Research evidence for specificity Taiwan International ESP Journal, 1, 5-22 Hyland, K & P Tse (2005) Evaluative that constructions: Signaling stance in research abstracts Functions of Language, 12, 39-64 Jafarigohar, M & Mohammadkhani, A (2015) Reporting verbs in applied linguistics research articles by native and non-native writers Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 5, 2490-2496 Lackstrom, J E., Selinker, L., & Trimble, L (1972) Grammar and technical English English Teaching Forum 105 Episodes in ESP Oxford: Pergamon Luzón, M.-J (2018) Variation in academic writing practices: The case of reporting verbs in English-medium research articles Ibérica 36, 171-194 52 Malcolm, L (1987) What rules govern tense usage in scientific articles? English for Specific Purposes, 6, 31-44 Manan, N A & Noor, N M (2014) Analysis of reporting verbs in master's theses Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 134, 140-145 Nanyue, X (2013) The Development of Use of Reporting Verbs in Academic Writing: A Case Study with Two Chinese Students Master thesis, University of Exeter, England Nguyen, T T L (2014) Move-Step Structures and Citation Practice in English TESOL Master's Theses by Vietnamese Students Doctoral thesis, Suranaree University of Technology, Thailand Nguyen, T T L (2017) Reporting verbs in TESOL master‟s theses written by Vietnamese postgraduate students The Asian ESP Journal, 13, 35 – 58 Nguyen, T T L & Pramoolsook, I (2015a) Reporting verbs in literature review chapters of TESOL master's theses written by Vietnamese postgraduates ESP Today, 3, 196-215 Nguyen, T T L & Pramoolsook, I (2015b) Citation in Vietnamese TESOL: Analysis of master‟s thesis introduction chapters The Asian ESP Journal, 11, 95120 Nguyen, T T L & Pramoolsook, I (2016) Citation practice in the whole TESOL master‟s theses by Vietnamese postgraduates The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 22, 79 – 92 Oster, S., (1981) The use of tenses in reporting past literature In Selinker, Tarone, & Hanzeli, eds English for academic and technical purposes: Studies in honor of Louis Trimble Newburgh House Shaw, P (1992) Reasons for the correlation of voice, tense, and sentence function in reporting verbs Applied Linguistics, 13, 302-319 Swales, J M (1986) Citation analysis and discourse analysis Applied Linguistics, 7, 39-56 Swales, J M (1990) Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Swales, J M (2014) Variation in citational practice in a corpus of student biology papers: From Parenthetical Plonking to Intertextual Storytelling Written Communication, 31, 118–141 53 Swales, J & Feak, C (2004) Academic Writing for Graduate Students Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 2nd Edition Thomas, S & Hawes, T (1994) Reporting verbs in medical journal articles English for Specific Purposes, 13, 129-148 Thompson, G., (1996) Voices in the text: discourse perspectives on language reports Applied Linguistics, 17, 501-530 Thompson, G & Ye, Y (1991) Evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers Applied Linguistics, 12, 365–382 Thompson, P & C Tribble (2001) Looking at citations: Using corpora in English for academic purposes Language Learning and Technology 5, 91-105 Weissberg, R & Buker, S (1990) Writing Up Research: Experimental Research Report Writing for Students of English Prentice Hall Yeganeh, M T & Boghayeri, M (2015) The frequency and function of reporting verbs in research articles written by native Persian and English speakers Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 192, 582–586 Yilmaz, M & Ozdem Erturk, Z (2017) A contrastive corpus-based analysis of the use of reporting verbs by native and non-native ELT researchers NovitasROYAL (Research on Youth and Language), 11, 112-127 Zhang, X (2008) A Contrastive Study of Reporting in Master‟s Theses in Native Chinese and in Native English Master thesis, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh 54 APPENDICES A Categories of common reporting verbs according Hyland’s (2002) framework Following are categories of common reporting verbs according Hyland‟s (2002) framework We refer to Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan (2014: Appendix E) Research verbs: - Findings: + Factive: demonstrate, establish, show, solve, confirm, prove, provide evidence, declare, invent, coin, work out (a definition) + Counter-factive: fail, misunderstand, ignore, overlook, not study + Non-factive: find, identify, observe, obtain, present, reveal, uncover, discover, list, introduce, find out, offer, give (out), classify, categorize, propose, distinguish, modify, illustrate, provide, group, make a table, narrow down, add up, figure out, divide - Procedures: analyze, calculate, assay, explore, plot, recover, review, study, base (on), replicate, compare, investigate, perform, set up, define, conduct, develop, carry out, examine, do, tackle, explore, use, make use, apply, work (on), design, administer, interview, survey Cognition verbs - Positive: agree, concur, hold, know, think, understand, content, realize, recognize, interpret - Critical: disagree, dispute, not think - Tentative: believe, doubt, speculate, suppose, suspect, consider, mean, assume, view, conceptualize, contend - Neutral: picture, conceive, anticipate, reflect, notice, see, predict, imagine, Discourse verbs: - Doubts: + Tentative: postulate, hypothesize, indicate, intimate, suggest, imply, comment, mention, make (a) point, remark, denote, estimate, recommend, propose, advise, admit, determine, judge + Critical: evade, exaggerate, (not) account, (not) make point, (not) mention, pose a question - Assurance: I + Factive: argue, affirm, explain, note, point out, claim, not deny, confirm, reconfirm, assert, support, advance, advocate, emphasize, stress, put, insist, proclaim, make a (positive adjective) point, acknowledge, pinpoint, confess, underline, reaffirm, add, back up, clarify, convince, maintain, approve, attest, stipulate, highlight, substantiate, accept, defend, ensure, supplement) + Non-factive: state, describe, discuss, report, answer, define, summarize, say, address, write, conclude, comment, repeat, refer, draw attention, name, label, have (idea), express (viewpoint), associate, call, designate, cite, articulate, treat) - Counters: deny, critique, challenge, attack, question, warn, refute, rule out, oppose B Corpus of the study In the following is the list of articles in the Vietnamese corpus: No VN01 VN02 Articles Phạm Hùng Dũng (2010) Ý nghĩa cực cấp tiếng Việt tiếng Anh (179), 22-30 Phan Văn Hòa & Phan Thị Thủy Tiên (2010) Cấu trúc chuyển tác ngôn Anh Việt 11 (181), 18-29 VN03 Thái Duy Bảo (2011) Đường hướng đào tạo tiếng Anh chuyên biệt cho chuyên ngành tiếng Anh – Tại không? 12 (194), 11-19 VN04 Đỗ Thị Xuân Dung (2011) Dạy học tiếng Anh chuyên ngành theo nhu cầu xã hội 12 (194), 37-44 VN05 Dương Thị Thực (2012) Về hành vi ngôn ngữ ngữ cảnh (Qua tài liệu tác giả nước ngoài) (197), 1-11 VN06 Nguyễn Thị Mến (2012) Chức ngữ dụng lời cảm ơn tiếng Việt (201), 8-15 VN07 Trương Thị Thu Hà (2012) Thử xác định tiêu chí nhận diện vị từ trình tiếng Việt 11 (205), 6-18 VN08 Nguyễn Thị Hồng Vân (2013) Tổ chức đề ngữ ngơn tường thuật bóng đá trực tiếp truyền hình (210), 30-36 VN09 Lê Thị Hằng (2013) Thiết kế chương trình dạy tiếng Anh giao tiếp đại học không chuyên ngữ (214), 24-31 II VN10 Nguyễn Văn Hiệp & Đinh Thị Hằng (2014) Thực trạng sử dụng tiếng Việt “phi chuẩn” giới trẻ nhìn từ góc độ ngơn ngữ học xã hội (223), 1-10 VN11 Nguyễn Văn Trào (2014) Bàn dịch thành ngữ Anh-Việt (trên sở ngữ liệu thành ngữ có yếu tố màu sắc: xanh, đen, đỏ, trắng) (225), 35-44 VN12 Lưu Quý Khương & Trần Thị Thanh Phúc (2014) Chuyển mã tiếng Việt tiếng Anh công cụ giao tiếp nơi làm việc (225), 44-52 Trần Thị Thanh Hương (2014) Chiến lược giao tiếp xưng hô thành VN13 VN14 VN15 viên ban giám khảo chương trình truyền hình thực tế tiếng Việt tiếng Anh (225), 53-62 Nguyễn Văn Hiệp (2015) Ngữ pháp chức hệ thống đánh giá ngôn ngữ “phi chuẩn” giới trẻ theo quan điểm ngữ pháp chức hệ thống (231), 17-25 Vũ Thị Thanh Hương (2015) Giới tương tác ngôn ngữ lớp học (231), 26-35 In the following is the list of articles in the English corpus No Articles (in Journal of English for Academic Purposes) EL01 Hewings, A., Lillis, T & Vladimirou, D (2010) Who‟s citing whose writings? A corpus based study of citations as interpersonal resource in English medium national and English medium international journals 9, 102-115 EL02 Lynch, T (2011) Academic listening in the 21st century: Reviewing a decade of research 10, 79–88 EL03 Field, J (2011) Into the mind of the academic listener 10, 102-112 EL04 Wingate, U (2012) „Argument!‟ helping students understand what essay writing is about 11, 145-154 EL05 Donohue, J P (2012) Using systemic functional linguistics in academic III writing development: An example from film studies 11, 4-16 EL06 EL07 EL08 EL09 EL10 EL11 EL12 Coffin, C & Donohue, J P (2012) Academic Literacies and systemic functional linguistics: How they relate? 11, 64-7 Wingate, U (2012) Using Academic Literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: A „literacy‟ journey 11, 26-37 Cutting, D J.(2012) Vague language in conference abstracts 11, 283293 Nathan, P (2013) Academic writing in the business school: The genre of the business case report 12, 57-68 Davis, M (2013) The development of source use by international postgraduate students 12, 125-135 McCulloch, S (2013) Investigating the reading-to-write processes and source use of L2 postgraduate students in real-life academic tasks: An exploratory study 12, 136-147 Hobbs, V (2014) Accounting for the great divide: Features of clarity in analytic philosophy journal articles 15, 27-36 EL13 Unlu, Z & Wharton, S M (2015) Exploring classroom feedback interactions around EAP writing: A data based model 17, 24-36 EL14 Smith, A F V & Thondhlana, J (2015) The EAP competencies in a group case study project as revealed by a task analysis 20, 14-27 EL15 Kuzborska, I (2015) Perspective taking in second language academic reading: A longitudinal study of international students' reading practices 20, 149-161 IV ... of authors  Studies focusing on comparison in the use of reporting verbs by English native and non-native authors  Studies focusing on reporting verbs in different languages in a comparison... written by English and Vietnamese authors?  What are the similarities and differences in the denotation functions of reporting verbs in linguistics research articles by English and Vietnamese authors? ... reporting verbs in academic writing However, English authors use more reporting verbs than Vietnamese authors Regarding denotation functions of reporting verbs in Hyland‟s (1999) framework, reporting