Academic discourse 95
These fundamental differences between disciplines lead to differences
in discourse, as confirmed by many contrastive studies. The corpus-based
work of Hyland has been particularly influential in providing linguistic data
which support Becher and Trowler’s analysis. For example, in a large study
of 240 RAs, Hyland (2001) showed that first person pronoun use was much
lower in hard than soft fields, a finding which underscores the description
of hard fields as dealing with universals in an impersonal and objective way.
Disciplinary differences, then, are an important variable which we need
to take into account. In multidisciplinary contexts, it may not be possible
to provide material in all relevant disciplines and even in single-discipline
classes there may be field-specific variation with accompanying differences
in discoursal features. In both cases, however, we can avoid making over-
generalizations and encourage students to examine the discourse of their
own discipline individually.
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