Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals

Academic communication occurs in a multicultural world with different culture-specific academic writing standards, intellectual styles and discourse expectations. Yet despite these differences, globalization of scholarship has considerably levelled out the standards on academic writing. The study a...

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Main Author: Olga Boginskaya
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2025-01-01
Series:Forma y Función
Subjects:
Online Access:https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/formayfuncion/article/view/111314
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author Olga Boginskaya
author_facet Olga Boginskaya
author_sort Olga Boginskaya
collection DOAJ
description Academic communication occurs in a multicultural world with different culture-specific academic writing standards, intellectual styles and discourse expectations. Yet despite these differences, globalization of scholarship has considerably levelled out the standards on academic writing. The study aims to explore the impact of intellectual styles on choosing metadiscourse resources by non-native English writers from different cultural backgrounds in the context of globalized higher education. The participants were 116 engineering students who were taking a postgraduate course. To investigate hedges and boosters in students’ research proposals, the methods of quantitative and contextual analysis were adopted. Research proposals by Asian and East European postgraduate students were taken for the cross-cultural study based on Galtung’s and Hind’s theories of writing styles. Findings revealed that research proposals by Slavic students exposed to Teutonic writer-responsible culture featured a larger number of hedges. Asian-authored writing that is considered to be influenced by Nipponic reader-responsible culture and often regarded as indirect featured far more boosters than Slavic-authored texts considered to be precise and clear.
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issn 0120-338X
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language English
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publisher Universidad Nacional de Colombia
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spelling doaj-art-d95b0475ea4b4c3397cd881e84c3f99a2025-01-30T06:10:25ZengUniversidad Nacional de ColombiaForma y Función0120-338X2256-54692025-01-0138110.15446/fyf.v38n1.111314Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research ProposalsOlga Boginskaya0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9738-8122Irkutsk State University Academic communication occurs in a multicultural world with different culture-specific academic writing standards, intellectual styles and discourse expectations. Yet despite these differences, globalization of scholarship has considerably levelled out the standards on academic writing. The study aims to explore the impact of intellectual styles on choosing metadiscourse resources by non-native English writers from different cultural backgrounds in the context of globalized higher education. The participants were 116 engineering students who were taking a postgraduate course. To investigate hedges and boosters in students’ research proposals, the methods of quantitative and contextual analysis were adopted. Research proposals by Asian and East European postgraduate students were taken for the cross-cultural study based on Galtung’s and Hind’s theories of writing styles. Findings revealed that research proposals by Slavic students exposed to Teutonic writer-responsible culture featured a larger number of hedges. Asian-authored writing that is considered to be influenced by Nipponic reader-responsible culture and often regarded as indirect featured far more boosters than Slavic-authored texts considered to be precise and clear. https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/formayfuncion/article/view/111314writing stylemetadiscourseresearch proposalsacademic discoursecultural context
spellingShingle Olga Boginskaya
Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
Forma y Función
writing style
metadiscourse
research proposals
academic discourse
cultural context
title Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
title_full Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
title_fullStr Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
title_full_unstemmed Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
title_short Culture-specific Writing Styles in Postgraduate Students’ Research Proposals
title_sort culture specific writing styles in postgraduate students research proposals
topic writing style
metadiscourse
research proposals
academic discourse
cultural context
url https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/formayfuncion/article/view/111314
work_keys_str_mv AT olgaboginskaya culturespecificwritingstylesinpostgraduatestudentsresearchproposals