Towards the synergy of genre and corpus based approaches to academic writing research and pedagogy

International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 Towards the Synergy of Genre- and Corpus-Based Approaches to Academic Writing Research and Pedagogy Xiaofei Lu, The Pennsylvania State University, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2365-2581 J Elliott Casal, The Pennsylvania State University, USA Yingying Liu, The Pennsylvania State University, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5077-2231 ABSTRACT This paper outlines the research agenda of a framework that integrates corpus- and genre-based approaches to academic writing research and pedagogy This framework posits two primary goals of academic writing pedagogy, that is, to help novice writers develop knowledge of the rhetorical functions characteristic of academic discourse and become proficient in making appropriate linguistic choices to materialize such functions To these ends, research in this framework involves 1) compilation of corpora of academic writing annotated for rhetorical functions, 2) analysis of the organization and distribution of such functions, 3) analysis of the linguistic features associated with different functions, 4) development of computational tools to automate functional annotation, 5) use of the annotated corpora in academic writing pedagogy, and 6) exploration of the role of form-function mappings in academic writing assessment The implications of this framework for promoting consistent attention to form-function mappings in academic writing research, pedagogy, and assessment are discussed Keywords Assessment, Computational Tools, Corpus Analysis, Form-Function Mappings, Genre Analysis, Genre Competence, Linguistic Features, Rhetorical Functions INTRODUCTION Decades of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing research have emphasized the “dynamic complexity of discursive practices” (Bhatia, 2015, p 9) by highlighting the intentions and choices of writers, as well as the expectations of discourse community members Such research has drawn on various methodological approaches but is particularly associated with rhetorical move-step analysis of writers’ communicative goals and corpus analysis of recurring patterns of linguistic features A substantial portion of this research has focused on research article (RA) writing, in large part due to the increasing importance for scholars around the world to publish their research in English language academic journals (Curry & Lillis, 2004) and the understanding that the RA represents “a high stakes DOI: 10.4018/IJCALLT.2021010104  Copyright © 2021, IGI Global Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited  59 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 game upon which hiring, promotion, and continued employment can depend” (Belcher, 2007, pp 1-2) in the academic world EAP writing pedagogy is motivated by the complexity and significance of EAP research writing for novice and established scholars The notion of writing development itself has expanded beyond formal knowledge of language (Polio, 2017) and/or rhetorical knowledge in isolation Rather, developing genre competence for participation in disciplinary genre practices entails development and integration of rhetorical and formal knowledge dimensions (among others), as highlighted in Tardy’s (2009) multidimensional model of genre knowledge development There have been calls for the “integration of genre analysis and corpus-based investigations” (Flowerdew, 2005, p 5) in genre-based analysis of academic writing practices, and a number of scholars have begun to respond by implementing move-based genre analysis and corpus approaches (e.g., Cortes, 2013; Durrant & Mathews-Aydınlı, 2011; Le & Harrington, 2015; Lim, 2010; Lu, Casal, & Liu, 2020; Omidian, Shahriari, & Siyanova-Chanturia, 2018; Yoon & Casal, 2020a) However, research addressing the “function-form gap” (Moreno & Swales, 2018, p 41) in largescale, systematic ways is scarce in EAP writing scholarship Furthermore, many extant integrated analyses privilege corpus-based approaches over move-step analysis by assigning move-step codes to decontextualized extracted features, perhaps due to the considerable time commitments involved in manual analysis (Flowerdew, 2005) This paper addresses this paucity by proposing and outlining a framework for EAP corpus-based genre analysis that covers corpus compilation; qualitative rhetorical and functional coding and annotation; corpus-based linguistic analysis and annotation; and integrated rhetorical-linguistic pedagogical and assessment applications ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES RESEARCH ON WRITING PRACTICES EAP Writing Research in the “Social/Genre” Tradition Tribble (2009, 2015) identified three approaches to EAP writing instruction: “Social/Genre”, “Intellectual/Rhetorical” and “Academic Literacies” Much EAP writing research aligns with the Social/Genre approach, which is “situated within an English for Specific Purposes tradition” (Tribble, 2015, p 442) Such research predominantly follows the rhetorical move analysis closely associated with the work of Swales (1990, 2004) and is valued for the emphasis placed on writers’ rhetorical choices in relation to their understanding of community expectations and conventionalized genre practices In such analysis, a rhetorical move refers to a recurring, recognizable functional aim of a particular genre (e.g., establishing a research territory in RA introductions; Swales, 1990) Steps are the proposition-driven (Moreno & Swales, 2018) components that build a rhetorical move Both moves and steps can be linguistically realized over chunks of variable length, so move analysis is often conducted with the rhetorical chunk as the unit of analysis Rhetorical move frameworks are developed and applied through both bottom-up and top-down manual analysis of text that relies on linguistic cues, rhetorical markers, structural elements, and a variety of other signals of rhetorical intent It often results in rhetorical move frameworks that describe both the range and consistency of rhetorical aims within a genre Swales’ (1990, 2004) (revised) Creating a Research Space model has been a highly productive framework for analyzing RA introductions (e.g., Hirano, 2009; Samraj, 2002) and literature reviews (e.g., Jian, 2010; Kwan, Chan, & Lam, 2012) Genre analysts have continued the Swalesean tradition by creating frameworks to account for the rhetorical structure of other main RA sections, including Cotos, Huffman, and Link’s (2017) Demonstrating Rigor and Credibility model for research methodologies and Yang and Allison’s (2003) unnamed framework for Results, Discussions, and Conclusion sections (see also Basturkmen, 2011; Bruce, 2009) Other scholars have conducted move-step analysis on other academic genres, such as conference abstracts (e.g., Samar, Talebzadeh, Kiany, & Akbari, 2014; Yoon & Casal, 2020b) 60 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 Such scholarship has resulted in a number of discipline specific or general frameworks to analyze RA writing and has showcased variability within and across disciplines Rhetorical Move frameworks such as the CARS model have profoundly impacted EAP writing pedagogy, featuring prominently in graduate writing textbooks (e.g., Swales & Feak, 2012) and classrooms, and have become recognized analytical and pedagogical tools beyond Applied Linguistics However, as valuable as rhetorical move analysis has been in EAP research and pedagogy, rhetorical descriptions of text can only provide learners with limited understandings of the range of resources available to writers in the realization of rhetorical goals Moreno and Swales (2018) note that a “widely shared aspiration of move analysts has been to identify the linguistic features characterizing the various RA moves” (p 40), and yet, until somewhat recently, the vast majority of these studies explore the rhetorical move structures themselves, rather than how these communicative goals are accomplished Corpus-Based EAP Writing Research Another important portion of EAP writing research has adopted a corpus-based approach, with a strong focus on the linguistic features of the academic discourse, linguistic differences of academic writing produced by different writer groups, the relationship of various linguistic features to writing quality, and the use of corpora in EAP writing pedagogy Corpus-based EAP writing research has investigated linguistic features of the academic discourse of various formal (e.g., imperatives and conditionals) and functional categories (e.g., hedges and boosters) (e.g., Banks, 2017; Hyland, 1998) Additionally, there has been notable interest in compiling pedagogically useful lists of academic vocabulary (e.g., Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014), collocations (e.g., Ackermann & Chen, 2013; Lei & Liu, 2018), and various types of multiword expressions, such as formulas (e.g., Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) and phrase-frames (e.g., Lu, Yoon, & Kisselev, 2018), using increasingly sophisticated corpus methodologies and large academic corpora Lists of academic vocabulary and collocations are usually organized alphabetically, by frequency, or by collocation type and not concern themselves with rhetorical functions Lists of multiword expressions, however, are often organized by structure and function to enhance their pedagogical usefulness (e.g., Lu, Yoon, et al., 2018; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) It should be noted, however, that the functional categories of formulaic sequences are not rhetorical functions, but broad discourse functions such as referential expressions, stance expressions, and discourse organizers (Biber, Conrad, & Cotes, 2004) If the products of such research are to serve as powerful pedagogical resources or to inform EAP writing syllabus construction, insights into the rhetorical affordances of such linguistic resources are needed Many corpus-based studies have compared the use of various linguistic features in academic writing among different writer groups, such as writers with different L1 status, levels of language proficiency, or levels of expertise For example, some studies identified differences in formulaic language use in academic writing between expert and novice writers (e.g., Hyland, 2008; O’Donnell, Römer, & Ellis, 2013), although it has been shown that the specific differences found may be affected by various methodological considerations, such as how formulaic sequences are defined and operationalized (Lu, Kisselev, Yoon, & Amory, 2018; O’Donnell et al., 2013) Many comparative studies reported extra challenges faced by L2 learners in academic writing, such as underuse of linguistic features characteristic of expert writing (Gilquin, 2015), employment of idiosyncratic expressions not present in expert writing (Chen & Baker, 2010; Gilquin, 2015), and persistence of interlingual errors even at the advanced proficiency level (Laufer & Waldman, 2011) The betweengroup differences and learner challenges identified in such studies may help inform the formal focus of EAP writing pedagogy A large body of corpus-based EAP writing research has assessed the quantitative relationships of diverse linguistic constructs and features to academic writing quality Studies along this line have generally used computational tools to automate the analysis of one or more linguistic constructs and adopted sophisticated statistical procedures to evaluate their relationships to human ratings of writing 61 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 quality One example of a heavily researched construct is syntactic complexity, often construed as the variety and degree of sophistication of the syntactic structures deployed in written production (e.g., Crossley & McNamara, 2014; Kyle, 2016; Lu, 2011, 2017) Several computational tools that incorporate various coarse- or fine-grained measures of sentential, clausal and phrasal complexity have been used to automate syntactic complexity analysis, such as the Biber Tagger (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999), the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010), Coh-Metrix (McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014), and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (Kyle, 2016) A number of studies have revealed features incorporated in these tools (e.g., Crossley & McNamara, 2014; Kyle & Crossley, 2018; Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015) or their co-occurrence patterns (Biber, Gray, & Staples, 2016; Friginal & Weigle, 2014) that are discriminative of high and low-scored essays or predictive of writing quality This body of research has offered useful insight into how the absence/presence, frequency, or cooccurrence patterns of diverse linguistic features may be quantitatively related to writing quality The explicitly stated aim of much of such corpus-based EAP research is to inform EAP writing instruction, either through the provision of insights into what should be included in a course syllabus, or by informing materials design Meanwhile, pedagogical research that directly integrates corpus resources in academic writing instruction is emerging but relatively limited (Chang, 2014; Charles, 2014, 2018; Dong & Lu, 2020; Gilmore, 2009) Some studies looked into the use of corpora as a resource to facilitate learners’ self-correction of lexico-grammatical errors in their writing (Gilmore, 2009) Others revealed the pedagogical value of specialized corpora and/or student-compiled discipline-specific corpora, along with hands-on, contextualized searches and examinations of the usage patterns of relevant linguistic features, in promoting learner engagement and attention to details in academic writing (Chang, 2014; Lee & Swales, 2006; Charles, 2014, 2018; Dong & Lu, 2020) Positive learner feedback to such a corpus approach and sustained learner engagement with the approach after the completion of formal instruction have been reported (e.g., Charles, 2014; Dong & Lu, 2020) The importance of adequate instructor support in deploying such an approach has been explicitly discussed (e.g., Chang, 2014) Additionally, some scholars noted the need to integrate corpus analysis and genre analysis of academic writing Charles (2007), for example, recommended reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to EAP writing instruction and proposed various teaching activities for this purpose A notable limitation of extant corpus-based EAP writing studies lies in their tendency to privilege the examination of linguistic features over rhetorical functions The focus on linguistic features divorced from their rhetorical functions fails to fully capture the important fact that it is functionally effective use of linguistic features that underlies quality writing in the writing construct, not the presence and frequency of linguistic features alone To some extent, the form-function disconnect may negatively impact EAP writing learners (e.g., learners trying to plug in desirable features in functionally inappropriate ways) It is thus critical for corpus-based EAP writing research to start thinking more rigorously in terms of how it may better contribute to consistent attention to form-function mappings in teaching, learning, researching, and assessing academic writing Towards Corpus-Based Genre Analysis With an understanding that competent writers not make rhetorical or linguistic decisions in isolation, but rather integrate formal and rhetorical knowledge as part of a complex genre competence (Tardy, 2009), the authors argue that EAP research and pedagogy should integrate rhetorical move-step research and corpus-based approaches That is to say, both in scholarly and pedagogical approaches to EAP practice, attention should be paid to linguistic construction-rhetorical function relationships Such an integrated approach can capture and orient learners towards the range of linguistic resources involved in the realization of rhetorical aims, rather than emphasizing either rhetorical or linguistic dimensions on their own From a scholarly perspective, corpus analysis alone, such as those that generate academic lists (e.g., Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014) often lack information of 62 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 how recurrent linguistic patterns of features are used, while rhetorical move-step analysis alone often showcases a small range of linguistic resources Only recently have studies drawing from corpus and genre analysis begun to proliferate, with recent scholarship emphasizing analysis of linguistic features in terms of the rhetorical functions they serve (e.g., Cortes, 2013; Durrant & Mathews-Aydınlı, 2011; Le & Harrington, 2015; Lim, 2010; Lu et al., 2020; Omidian et al., 2018; Yoon & Casal, 2020a) Cortes (2013), Omidian et al (2018), and Yoon and Casal (2020a) adopted phraseological, formulaic language approaches from corpus linguistics and rhetorical ‘generic’ move structure perspectives to explore the choices writers make in the linguistic realization of communicative goals Cortes’ (2013) analysis of over 1,300 published RA introductions from 13 disciplines found that many of the lexical bundles that writers employed correlated with the realization of specific rhetorical moves/steps, and Omidian et al.’s (2018) analysis of 5,910 RA abstracts across six disciplines revealed “different priorities for representing” (p 1) research across disciplines However, while these represent a major step towards integrated corpus and genre analysis of EAP writing, both analyses attempted rhetorical analysis of the extracted linguistic chunks, reducing the linguistic context that coders can rely on to determine rhetorical aims Rhetoric is not accomplished exclusively at the phraseological level, but rather in tracts of text of variable length Yoon and Casal (2020a) analyzed the role of phrase frames, a form of discontinuous multi-word sequences, in the linguistic realization of writers’ aims in 625 accepted conference abstracts from the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, and their analysis fully integrated corpus-based linguistic analysis with complete move annotation of the entire corpus These analyses highlight the strong association that some phraseological features have with particular rhetorical aims Like Yoon and Casal (2020a), others have more fully integrated genre and corpus analysis to explore linguistic patterns in terms of the rhetorical aims they realize Lim (2010) and Le and Harrington (2015) conducted notably smaller analyses, with Lim exploring lexical choices in Results sections and Le and Harrington exploring clusters in Discussions Durrant and Mathews-Aydınlı (2011) also analyzed formulaic sequences, with particular emphasis on indicating the structure, using introduction sections of essays in the BAWE Corpus as a dataset, and Kanoksilapatham (2007) combined the analysis of move structure of the biochemistry RAs and multi-dimensional corpusbased analysis The former of these studies only provided a detailed discussion for one function, and the latter lacked detailed discussion of specific linguistic features associated with each move Lu et al (2020) adopted five previously used syntactic complexity measures to compare the use of syntactically complex structures in the realization of writers’ rhetorical goals in 600 published RA introductions from six social science disciplines, also exploring the rhetorical functions of the most complex sentences for each measure These studies all present evidence of the rhetorical affordances of particular linguistic features, which carries important implications for EAP text analysis research and for the teaching of EAP writing From a pedagogical perspective, Charles’ (2007) integrated corpus and genre analysis approach is especially prominent In her approach, classroom activity moves between interactive genre-based discourse analysis and student corpus-investigation to examine the rhetorical and linguistic construction of texts, as well as the range of resources available to writers Other pedagogical discussions along similar lines exist For example, Eriksson (2012) presented a lexical bundle workshop for ESL doctoral students in biochemistry and biotechnology The activities involved raising students’ awareness of the rhetorical functions of lexical bundles, examining lexical bundles specified by the instructor for a certain rhetorical function in a corpus of published texts, and using lexical bundles in their own writing Given the limited information provided regarding the rhetorical functions and the limited scope of the workshop (two three-hour workshops), this study showcases a potentially useful approach but does not document its impact Chen and Flowerdew (2018) conducted a similar, but largerscale project The researchers recruited 473 graduate student writers for a three-phase pedagogical intervention consisting of an introduction to corpora and corpus techniques, a series of workshops to guide participants through analysis of rhetorical goals and their linguistic realizations in discipline63 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 specific corpora with the concordance tools, and a self-directed corpus-building and analysis project that asked learners to compare their work to the expert corpus they compiled Participants were highly positive in their evaluation of the process, but the impacts were not assessed More recently, Dong and Lu (2020) analyzed the impacts of a discipline specific corpus and rhetorical move analysis based pedagogy on the writing of 30 engineering master’s students in a major Chinese university The pedagogical approach, which included learners and the instructor collaboratively compiling discipline specific corpora and analyzing them linguistically and rhetorically, was rated highly by learners and led to more frequent, intentional, and appropriate integration of rhetorical moves in their writing Overall, extant literature on EAP writing and writing instruction is trending towards a corpus-based genre analysis approach, which is positioned to address the widely shared goals of EAP scholarship and pedagogy, raising student awareness of rhetorical dimensions of disciplinary genre practices and expanding their repertoire of acceptable linguistic resources for the realization of rhetorical aims Notably, a parallel trend is emerging in the field of register analysis, now reconceptualized from its prior focus on cross-register linguistic variation to a focus on “the situation of use, … the linguistic features; and the functional associations between the situational characteristics and the linguistic features” (Conrad, 2019, p 170) Register analysis is distinguished from genre analysis in terms of its analytical foci For example, while genre analysis is usually performed on complete texts, with attention to the global rhetorical structure of and features conventionally associated with the target genre, register analysis may be performed on text excerpts, with broader attention to all pervasive linguistic features of a register or text type (Biber & Conrad, 2009) Acknowledging the usefulness of such distinctions for delineating different orientations to text analysis, the authors not delve into these distinctions here and use the term “corpus-based genre analysis” to refer to the integrated analysis of formal and rhetorical features of a target genre using corpus techniques EAP writing studies employing this approach are still scarce, and the approach has not matured methodologically Similarly, such scholarship does not directly interface with existing integrated approaches to EAP pedagogy The remainder of this article therefore outlines a framework for corpus-based genre analysis as a research and pedagogical tool TOWARDS A SYNERGISTIC FRAMEWORK This section outlines the research agenda of a synergistic framework that integrates corpus-based and genre-based approaches to academic writing research, pedagogy and assessment This framework posits two fundamental goals of academic writing research and pedagogy, i.e., to help novice academic writers develop adequate knowledge of the rhetorical functions characteristic of academic discourse and become proficient in making appropriate lexico-grammatical choices to effectively materialize such functions To these ends, research in this framework involves 1) compilation of corpora of expert and novice academic writing annotated for rhetorical functions, 2) analysis of the organization and distribution of such functions, 3) analysis of the linguistic features associated with different functions, 4) development of computational tools to automate functional annotation, 5) use of the annotated corpora in academic writing pedagogy, and 6) exploration of the role of form-function mappings in academic writing assessment It will hopefully become clear that research within this framework will be well poised to help promote consistent attention to form-function mappings in academic writing research, pedagogy, and assessment Compilation of Corpora of Academic Writing Annotated for Rhetorical Functions A necessary, critical part of the research agenda of this synergistic framework is the compilation of corpora of expert and learner academic writing annotated for rhetorical functions Such corpora will form the basis of the types of research outlined in the following sections While a number of corpora of academic writing already exist, large-scale, publicly available corpora of academic writing that have been annotated for rhetorical moves and steps are rare 64 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 Existing corpora of academic writing cover different disciplines, genres, and expertise levels, and in the case of L2 learner academic writing, different L1 backgrounds and proficiency levels as well A good example of publicly available corpora of academic writing is the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus (Alsop & Nesi, 2009) Many scholars have described self-compiled corpora that fit their specific research needs, too, such as the Hyland Corpus of Published Research Articles (Hyland, 1998) These and other similar corpora have proven highly useful for the types of corpus-based EAP writing research described above To facilitate the types of corpus-based genre analysis envisaged within the proposed research framework, however, it would be desirable to add rhetorical function annotation to corpora of academic writing This annotation effort will entail the development of models of rhetorical moves and steps appropriate for the genres and types of academic writing texts represented in the target corpus, which may be achieved using a combination of the top-down approach that taps into existing taxonomies developed by genre experts and the bottom-up approach that allows for new functional categories (rhetorical moves and steps) to emerge in the data The Corpus of Social Science Research Article Introductions (COSSRAI) (Lu, Yoon, et al., 2018; Lu et al., 2020) represents an example of a corpus of academic writing that has been fully annotated with rhetorical moves and steps The corpus contains the introduction sections of 600 published RAs in six social science disciplines (Anthropology, Applied Linguistics, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology) All samples have been annotated for rhetorical moves and steps by a team of seven researchers using an extensively adapted version of Swales’ (1990, 2004) CARS model While the unit of analysis is the rhetorical move or step, a tag is attached to the end of each sentence to indicate the rhetorical moves and steps it is part of The value of such a corpus will become apparent in the discussion of other research agenda items below Corpus-Based Analysis of Rhetorical Function Organization and Distribution A second part of the research agenda is to analyze the rhetorical organization as well as the distribution of different rhetorical functions using corpora of academic writing that have been annotated for rhetorical moves and steps This corpus-based genre analysis approach will usefully complement previous genre analysis studies that examined the rhetorical structure of different academic writing genres on a smaller scale In particular, it will allow us to examine patterns of rhetorical function organization and distribution for specific genres in a more generalizable way Some examples of the types of information that can be generated include the range of ways in which rhetorical moves and steps may be structured or sequenced, the overall frequency of individual moves and steps, the frequency of individual moves and steps in different positions (e.g., the beginning or ending of an RA introduction), and the frequency of different combinations or sequences of rhetorical moves and steps Importantly, it will also be useful to examine variation of rhetorical function organization and distribution across different disciplines and across writers with different expertise or proficiency levels For example, the COSSRAI mentioned above can be analyzed to reveal inter-disciplinary variation in how the research territory is established at the beginning of RA introductions as well as rhetorical steps that are unique to certain disciplines Corpus-Based Analysis of Linguistic Realizations of Rhetorical Functions The core component of the research agenda for this framework is the systematic analysis of the linguistic realizations of different rhetorical functions, or the linguistic features associated with different rhetorical moves and steps As discussed earlier, genre analysis research has a long history of reporting the emerging linguistic patterns observed in smaller-scale rhetorically-oriented analyses, and efforts have been made in many larger-scale corpus-based studies of academic writing to consider function broadly, but research that attempts to closely connect linguistic features to rhetorical moves and steps is emerging only recently (e.g., Cortes, 2013; Durrant & Mathews-Aydınlı, 2011; Le & Harrington, 2015; Lim, 2010; Omidian et al., 2018), with few adopting the approach of large-scale full 65 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 functional annotation (with Lu et al., 2020 and Yoon & Casal, 2020a representing notable exceptions) With corpora of academic writing fully annotated with rhetorical moves and steps and the power of corpus-based linguistic analysis, it becomes possible to dramatically expand the scope of linguistic features that can be systematically aligned with different rhetorical functions This integrated analysis will provide a richer description of the formal and rhetorical features of different academic genres than analyses of linguistic features and rhetorical functions in isolation The analytical results can also constitute useful pedagogical and reference resources that can be used to help EAP writing learners see how different rhetorical functions may be linguistically realized or what rhetorical functions different linguistic features are usually associated with As an example, Lu et al (2020) analyzed the rhetorical functions of syntactically complex sentences in the COSSRAI It would also be possible to systematically align other linguistic features, such as lexical bundles and phrase-frames identified from the corpus, to the rhetorical moves and steps in the corpus Development of Computational Tools to Automate Rhetorical Functional Annotation To facilitate further expansion of the scope of research within this framework, the research agenda would also include the development of computational tools to automate rhetorical function annotation Limited prior work exists in this area For example, Anthony’s (2003) AntMover was designed to determine the most likely rhetorical move for each sentence in a text The tool required the researchers to define a set of moves for texts in a specific discipline or genre and manually annotate a set of texts with those moves It then learned a set of features characteristic of the moves and uses them to guess the most probable move for each sentence in new texts Anthony and Lashikia (2003) evaluated the performance of the system on computer science journal articles and reported an accuracy of 70% on its best estimates and 90% when the top two best estimates were considered More recently, Cotos and Pendar (2016) described a system designed to automatically annotate each sentence in RA introductions with a rhetorical move and step The system learned a set of n-gram features from a corpus of manually annotated RA introductions and used a Support Vector Machine classifier to label sentences in new texts The authors reported an F-score of 654 for rhetorical move classification and of 61 for rhetorical step classification Future efforts to improve the accuracy of automatic tools for rhetorical function annotation will benefit from the availability of large-scale training data representing different academic disciplines and genres, integration of advanced machine learning methods such as deep learning (e.g., Deng & Liu, 2018), and inclusion of an enriched set of discriminative features derived from research findings on rhetorical function organization and distribution and linguistic realizations of different rhetorical functions Meanwhile, given that learner texts may contain features that are absent in the training data, it is important to empirically evaluate the accuracy of such automatic tools on learners texts and, if the accuracy is below expectation, to consider additional training with annotated learner texts or using such tools for computer-assisted human annotation (see, e.g., Dong & Lu, 2020) Corpus-Based Genre Analysis and EAP Writing Pedagogy Given the two fundamental goals posited for this research framework, the types of research described above are envisaged to not only provide research findings on rhetorical and linguistic characteristics of academic writing of different genres and in different disciplines that can be used to inform EAP writing pedagogy, but also generate functionally annotated corpora and pedagogical resources in the form of linguistic forms aligned with different rhetorical functions that can be directly used in EAP writing classrooms An essential part of the research agenda is then to explore ways to effectively apply these annotated corpora, pedagogical resources, and research findings in EAP writing classrooms, building on the success of prior studies that adopted a corpus-based genre approach to academic writing pedagogy (e.g., Charles, 2007; Chen & Flowerdew, 2018; Dong & Lu, 2020) In particular, the annotated corpora and pedagogical resources have the potential of helping EAP writing learners develop a deeper understanding of not only the rhetorical and linguistic expectations of different 66 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 academic genres but also the alignment between the two Additionally, they can also serve as useful reference tools that EAP writing learners can use in their own writing or revision processes Exploring the Role of Form-Function Mappings in Academic Writing Assessment A final component of the research agenda of this framework is to systematically explore the role of form-function mappings in academic writing assessment Previous corpus-based research on academic writing assessment and automatic essay scoring (AES) has primarily focused on linguistic features predictive of writing quality in isolation (e.g., Biber, Gray, & Staples, 2016; Crossley & McNamara, 2014; Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015) Such studies provide insights into which formal linguistic structures learners may benefit from acquiring, but the focus on frequency of structures divorced from function provides little insight into how learners can use such structures to create meaningful arguments In order to capture the fact that it is functionally appropriate use of linguistic features that underlies quality writing in the writing construct, it is important to systematically investigate EAP writing learners’ use of linguistic features in terms of the rhetorical goals they are deployed to realize and the relationship of such form-function mappings to academic writing quality Research in this area may involve rating the genre appropriateness and functional effectiveness of the linguistic features used in academic writing and assessing the relationship of such ratings to academic writing quality To this end, it will be necessary to develop valid and reliable ways to provide such ratings The identification of linguistic features that warrant analytical attention (e.g., formulaic language features or syntactic features) may be informed by findings from prior corpus-based research with respect to features that effectively operationalize relevant language subconstructs specified in the rating rubric and that are predictive of human ratings of writing quality As the technology for automatic rhetorical function annotation matures, a longer-term goal in AES research could be the development of technology to automatically rate the genre appropriateness and functional effectiveness of important language features CONCLUSION Building on emerging corpus-based genre analysis research that integrates rhetorical and formal analyses, the synergistic framework of corpus-based genre analysis research and the interconnected research agenda items outlined here aim to contribute a concrete and systematic way to promote consistent attention to form-function mappings in researching, teaching, learning and assessing academic writing Within this framework, the authors call for research efforts in compiling corpora of academic writing annotated for rhetorical functions and in using such corpora to systematically analyze the organization and distribution of rhetorical functions in academic writing of different genres and disciplines and, more importantly, the alignment between linguistic features and rhetorical functions Such research can not only generate insights into the linguistic realizations of different rhetorical goals in academic writing, but also useful pedagogical resources that document important linguistic expressions aligned to different rhetorical moves and steps The authors encourage corpusbased genre pedagogy that utilizes the research findings, annotated corpora, and pedagogical resources generated by such research to promote EAP writing learners’ awareness of form-function mappings in different academic genres and their competence in appropriate language features to effectively achieve their rhetorical goals Finally, the authors call for academic writing assessment research that considers the relationship of form-function mappings to academic writing quality, so as to provide EAP writing assessors and automatic writing evaluation systems with insights into how they can account for and reward effective development of individual voice in student academic writing, rather than the frequency of linguistic features alone 67 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 REFERENCES Ackermann, K., & Chen, Y.-H (2013) Developing the academic collocation list (ACL) – A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach Journal 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sequences in first and second language writing: Investigating effects of frequency, association, and native norm International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(1), 83–108 doi:10.1075/ijcl.18.1.07odo Omidian, T., Shahriari, H., & Siyanova-Chanturia, A (2018) A cross-disciplinary investigation of multi-word expressions in the moves of research article abstracts Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 36, 1–14 doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2018.08.002 Polio, C (2017) Second language writing development: A research agenda Language Teaching, 50(2), 261–275 doi:10.1017/S0261444817000015 Samar, R G., Talebzadeh, H., Kiany, G R., & Akbari, R (2014) Moves and steps to sell a paper: A crosscultural genre analysis of applied linguistics conference abstracts Text & Talk, 34(6), 759–785 doi:10.1515/ text-2014-0023 Samraj, B (2002) Introductions in research articles: Variations across disciplines English for Specific Purposes, 21(1), 1–17 doi:10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00023-5 70 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching Volume 11 • Issue • January-March 2021 Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, N C (2010) An academic formulas list: New methods in phraseology research Applied Linguistics, 31(4), 487–512 doi:10.1093/applin/amp058 Swales, J M (1990) Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings Cambridge University Press Swales, J M (2004) Research genres: Explorations and applications Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/ CBO9781139524827 Swales, J M., & Feak, C B (2012) Academic writing for graduate students (3rd ed.) 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ELT Journal, 69(4), 442–462 doi:10.1093/elt/ccv044 Yang, R., & Allison, D (2003) Research articles in applied linguistics: Moving from results to conclusions English for Specific Purposes, 22(4), 365–285 doi:10.1016/S0889-4906(02)00026-1 Yang, W., Lu, X., & Weigle, S A (2015) Different topics, different discourse: Relationships among writing topic, measures of syntactic complexity, and judgments of writing quality Journal of Second Language Writing, 28, 53–67 doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2015.02.002 Yoon, J., & Casal, J E (2020a) P-frames and rhetorical moves in Applied Linguistics conference proposals In U Römer, V Cortes, & E Friginal (Eds.), Advances in corpus-based research on academic writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise (pp 282–305) John Benjamins doi:10.1075/scl.95.12yoo Yoon, J., & Casal, J E (2020b) Rhetorical structure, sequence, and variation: A step‐driven move analysis of applied linguistics conference abstracts International Journal of Applied Linguistics, ijal.12300 Advance online publication doi:10.1111/ijal.12300 Xiaofei Lu is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University His research interests are primarily in corpus linguistics, computer assisted language learning, English for Academic Purposes, second language writing, and second language acquisition He is the author of Computational Methods for Corpus Annotation and Analysis (2014, Springer) J Elliott Casal is a Ph.D candidate in Applied Linguistics and a University Graduate Fellow at The Pennsylvania State University His research interests include corpus linguistics, English for Academic/Specific Purposes, second language writing, and corpus-based writing pedagogies His work appears in the Journal of Second Language Writing, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Language Learning and Technology, and System Yingying Liu is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University Her research interests include corpus linguistics, English for Academic Purposes, English phraseology, and lexicography Her work appears in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Language Teaching, and System 71 ... corpus-based and genre-based approaches to academic writing research, pedagogy and assessment This framework posits two fundamental goals of academic writing research and pedagogy, i.e., to help novice academic. .. from the corpus, to the rhetorical moves and steps in the corpus Development of Computational Tools to Automate Rhetorical Functional Annotation To facilitate further expansion of the scope of research. .. in the discussion of other research agenda items below Corpus-Based Analysis of Rhetorical Function Organization and Distribution A second part of the research agenda is to analyze the rhetorical