Written academic discourse in English: From local traditions to global outreach

Abstract

The text discusses the position of local academic traditions in the modern context of global academic discourse dominated by the Anglo-American rhetorical style that represents the standard for modern international academic communication. After reviewing some of the central notions attached to the discipline of genre analysis of written academic discourse, the paper argues for an extension of the traditional research agenda by calling for a broad sociolinguistics of genre. It is suggested that sociological, ethnographic, cross-cultural, translatological, pedagogical and critical approaches may enrich the current understanding of written academic genres. They can do so by revealing some of the ideologies and implicit norms on which particular disciplines rely in the discursive production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the textual practices present in the transformation, recontextualization, translation, editing, etc., that may affect the eventual form of the academic texts produced, in particular, by non-native scholars coming from other cultural and academic backgrounds than the dominant global English-language model.