The employment of reporting verbs in tesol research articles between non native and native english writers

HCMC, December 18, 2019 MASTER’S THESIS REPORT Student name: Tran Phuong Nhi Sex: Female Date of birth: June 27, 1994 Place of birth: Ho Chi Minh City Major: English Language Student co

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

-

TRAN PHUONG NHI

THE EMPLOYMENT OF REPORTING VERBS IN TESOL RESEARCH ARTICLES BETWEEN NON-NATIVE AND NATIVE ENGLISH WRITERS

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

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THE EMPLOYMENT OF REPORTING VERBS IN TESOL RESEARCH ARTICLES BETWEEN NON-NATIVE AND NATIVE ENGLISH WRITERS

Submitted to the Faculty of English Language

in partial fulfillment of the Master‘s degree in English Language

This thesis entiled: The Employment of Reporting Verbs in TESOL Research Articles between Non-Native and Native English Writers

was successfully defended and approved on May 28, 2020

at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH)

Academic Supervisor: Duong My Tham, Ph.D

Signature:

Examination Committee

1 Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu Ph.D Chair

2 Cao Thi Phuong Dung Ph.D Reader 1

3 Nguyen Thi Nhu Ngoc Ph.D Reader 2

4 Nguyen Tien Hung Ph.D Member

5 Le Van Tuyen Ph.D Secretary Member

On behalf of the Examination Committee

Chair

(full name, title, signature)

HCMC, December 18, 2019

MASTER’S THESIS REPORT

Student name: Tran Phuong Nhi Sex: Female

Date of birth: June 27, 1994 Place of birth: Ho Chi Minh City

Major: English Language Student code: 1741900062

I- Thesis title:

The Employment of Reporting Verbs in TESOL Research Articles between Non-native and Native English Writers

II- Objectives and contents:

This thesis is aimed to examine the frequency and explore the semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs that were used in TESOL research articles written by Non-native and Native English writers in a form of comparison

The thesis supports and raises the awareness of the Non-native and Vietnamese students to use reporting verbs appropriately

III- Starting date:

IV- Completing date: December 18, 2019

V- Academic supervisor: (full name, title) Duong My Tham Ph.D

SUPERVISOR DEAN OF FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

(full name, signature) (full name, signature)

HCMC UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

POSTGRADUATE INSTITUTE

_

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I certify my authorship of the Master‘s Thesis submitted today entitled:

THE EMPLOYMENT OF REPORTING VERBS IN TESOL RESEARCH

ARTICLES BETWEEN NON-NATIVE AND NATIVE ENGLISH WRITERS

In terms of the statement of the requirements for Theses in Master‘s Programs issued

by Higher Degree Committee of Faculty of English Language, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2019

Signature: TRẦN PHƯƠNG NHI

i

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, TRAN PHUONG NHI, being a candidate for the degree of Master

of Arts (English Language) accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master‘s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my Master‘s Thesis deposited

in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Librarian for the care, loan and reproduction for theses

Ho Chi Minh City, December 2019

Signature: TRẦN PHƯƠNG NHI

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to show my gratefulness to my supervisor, Dr Duong

My Tham, for her insightful instruction, patience, encouragement, and constructive feedback on my entire thesis

I would like to show my gratitude to all the lecturers of English at Faculty of English language – HUTECH University especially Dr Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu, who consulted and supported me to find a right way to conduct the Master thesis I would also like to thank Dr Tran Quoc Thao for his guidance on writing a standard thesis

I am indebted Board of Examiners for considering my thesis and giving me precious advice that I can improve this thesis well

Finally, I would like to say thank you to my family for supporting, encouraging and giving me a lot of motivation to complete the thesis

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ABSTRACT

The aims of this thesis were to research the differences in using reporting verbs in terms of frequency and semantic dimensions between non-native and native English writers in their TESOL research articles The research sample was a corpus of

60 research articles which contains 30 articles written by non-native English writers, and 30 other articles written by native English writers, adopted in the thesis The thesis employed mixed-methods research in which both qualitative and quantitative methods used to analyze the corpus AntConc Software version 3.5.7 was used in the research

to make a statistic for the frequency of each reporting verb quantitatively Then, semantic dimensions of reporting verbs were qualitatively analyzed by comparing similarities and differences in four main semantic aspects of reporting verbs, namely Affectedness, Explicitness, Speech Acts and Formality between non-native English and native English writers

The results showed that there were significant differences in the frequency and semantic dimensions of reporting verbs Specifically, the native English writers used reporting verbs with their strong argument for the findings, while non-native English writers used reporting verbs with the objective attitude to contribute and support their viewpoints Reporting verbs are very important in writing research because this is a tool to integrate the previous works of the other authors, their words

or their ideas; therefore, this thesis could be a reference for the further researchers to use reporting verbs proficiently in their research, and EFL teachers would instruct students to use reporting verbs appropriately

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LIST OF FIGURES

No table of figures entries found

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Semantic dimensions of the field of reporting verbs 17

Table 3.1 Corpora description 28

Table 3.2 Data analysis procedure 31

Table 3.3 The research questions in relation to data analysis tools 32

Table 4.1 Overview of the frequencies and the semantic dimensions of the four groups of reporting verbs in the two corpora of 60 research articles 34

Table 4.2 The example of Argue Group that is used by the native and non-native English writers 35

Table 4.3 The example of Find Group that is used by the native and non-native English writers 36

Table 4.4 The example of Think Group that is used by the native and non-native English writers 37

Table 4.5 The example of Show Group that is used by the native and non-native English writers 38

Table 4.6 Frequencies and Groups of reporting verbs adopted by the native and non-native English writers in TESOL research articles 39

Table 4.7 The frequencies and percentages of reporting verbs adopted in 60 research articles from non-native and native English writers 40

Table 4.8 The semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs in TESOL research articles adopted by non-native English writers 42

Table 4.9 The semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs in TESOL research articles adopted by native English writers 47

Table 4.10 The semantic dimensions of reporting verbs in TESOL research articles adopted by non-native and native English writers 53

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CERTIFICATE OF THE ORIGINALITY i

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

ABSTRACT vi

LIST OF FIGURES v

LIST OF TABLES vi

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background to the study 1

1.2 Statement of the problems 3

1.3 Aims and objectives of the study 4

1.4 Research questions 4

1.5 Scope of the study 4

1.6 Significance of the study 4

1.7 Definition of the key terms 5

1.8 Organization of the Thesis 6

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 8

2.1 Definition of reporting verbs 8

2.2 Types of reporting verbs 9

2.3 Semantic dimensions of reporting verbs 15

2.4 Previous studies 18

2.5 Conceptual framework 24

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 27

3.1 Research design 27

3.2 Sample and sampling procedures 28

3.3 Data collection procedure 29

3.4 Data analysis procedure 30

3.5 Reliability and Validity 32

3.6 Summary 33

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 34

4.1 Results 34

4.1.1 An overview of reporting verbs in a corpus 60 research articles written by native and non-native English writers 34

4.1.2 Significant differences in terms of frequency of reporting verbs between non-native and native English writers 38

4.1.3 The semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs adopted by non-native and native English writers 41

4.2 Discussion 56

4.2.1 Frequencies of reporting verbs 56

4.2.2 Semantic dimensions 58

4.3 Summary 60

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 61

5.1 Summary of the main findings of the thesis 61

5.2 Implications of the research 62

5.3 Limitations of the research 63

5.4 Recommendations for the further research 63

5.5 Summary 63

REFERENCES 65

APPENDIX A: THE LIST OF SAMPLE JOURNALS IN THESIS 71

APPENDIX B: SAMPLES OF THE TESOL RESEARCH ARTICLES AND INTERFACE OF ANTCONC SOFTWARE 3.5.7 72

APPENDIX C: LIST OF REPORTING VERBS AND THEIR POSITIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING 73

APPENDIX D: LIST OF SURVEYED ARTICLES 78

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study

Writing research articles requires writers to have a certain knowledge of the research issues, techniques, and specific writing styles That is, the writers have

to arrange all the words and ideas carefully for the research can be written efficiently In some significant previous studies, the reporting verbs introduce previous works of other authors while without acknowledging the authors as the reporters of their results Reporting verbs play an important role in the research because this is a tool to integrate the previous works of other authors, their words,

or their ideas

The reporting verb is known as one of the obvious ways for the writer to establish the credibility of the reported works (Bloch, 2010; Hawes & Thomas (1994); Hyland (1999, 2002a); Bloch (2010, p 221) notes that non-native English writers always have difficulty in choosing the reporting verbs to ―satisfy both the syntactic requirements of their sentences and perhaps, more importantly, to express their attitudes towards the claims‖ Manan and Noor (2014) said that the writers can use appropriate reporting verbs to quote the statements from other research which are persuasive and suitable to their viewpoints This happened because the writers who are novices may lack a full understanding of the meaning of reporting verbs, or

we can say that the semantic dimensions of reporting verbs are not received the right attention from the inexperienced researchers Thus, the writers have to choose

in context the suitable reporting verbs for every idea and word they collect from the other authors to show exactly their behaviors (agree, neutral, or disagree, etc.) to those ideas and offer the writers‘ ideas in their research articles

Researching reporting verbs is the genre analysis, a type of research academic writings and research articles In this thesis, we shall find the meaning of reporting verbs in genre analysis and their roles in the research articles

On the one hand, the research article is ―one of the most important genres

that received considerable attention in genre analysis‖ (Fadi, 2017, p.2) In genre analysis, reporting verbs are the one that draws the attention of most researchers because it is the important components in academic writing (Manan & Noor, 2014) Reporting verbs used in academic writing help the writers show the sources from other authors into their works Furthermore, the critical component of research articles is reporting verbs Reporting verbs help the quoted statements in the research shall be more persuasive and truthful, and it is also the constant foundation for the writers‘ studies In some significant studies, reporting verbs are used for introducing previous works without acknowledging the authors as the reporters of their results (Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan, 2017) Reporting verbs keep an important role

in the research because this is a form of integrating the previous works of the other authors, their words, or their ideas but do not illegally copy all their published knowledge

On the other hand, reporting verbs are the effective ways for the writers

to establish the reliability of the reported claims (Bloch, 2010; Hawes & Thomas (1994); Hyland (1999, 2002a); Thompson & Ye, 1991) According to Manan and Noor (2014), by using reporting verbs, the writers are allowed to use appropriate words to link to the source they have found it persuading and suitable to their viewpoint of the research issues Bloch (2010, p 221) notes that non-native English students always have the difficulty in choosing the reporting verbs to ―satisfy both the syntactic requirements of their sentences and, perhaps more importantly, to express their attitudes towards the claims‖

Adopting appropriate reporting verbs in citing the works of the other authors helps writers to support their statements in the research legally and effectively This means the writers show their respect and give credit to the previous studies

1.2 Statement of the problems

One of the most important aspects of academic writings or research is using reporting verbs to show the references of the other authors‘ literature (Yeganeh & Boghayeri, 2015) The appropriate reporting verbs will make a good effect on the citation process Charles (2006) affirmed that the right reporting verbs allowed the writers to show the opinions they quote from other resources Many researchers found that it is very important for using reporting verbs in the right contexts and others‘ ideas we would like to quote However, in an investigation into using reporting verbs, Yeganeh & Boghayeri (2015) found that ―non-native students often fail to use them appropriately in their writing‖ (p 583) Bloch (2010) also pointed out that non-native English writers found it difficult to use reporting verbs Manan and Noor (2014) also assumed that the novice or non-native English writers

do not have enough attention to using the reporting verbs accurately

How to use reporting verbs appropriately is very critical but it is likely to

be underestimated in research, although, in reality, reporting verbs are one of the most important grammatical items in writing statements for academic writing (Hyland, 1998) Non-native English writers may not consider about which reporting verbs are most suitable for the particular statements in their study (Manan and Noor, 2014) Some researches show that the writers use the same reporting verbs repeatedly in their research and choose freely any reporting verbs that do not have any relation to the impact of the reporting verbs used (Bloch 2010)

Thus, this thesis aims to identify the reporting verbs by their semantic dimensions in the research articles written by non-native and native English writers and research how non-native and native English writers employed the reporting verbs in their articles Then there is a comparison between them in using reporting verbs, from which we can help non-native students to improve their academic writing Good understanding of using reporting verbs will help the writers cite the other authors‘ words and ideas into their studies appropriately and effectively and present their studies more persuasively (White, 2004)

1.3 Aims and objectives of the study

This study aimed to examine the frequency of reporting verbs and explore their semantic dimensions that were used in the TESOL research articles written by non-native and native English authors in a form of comparison of how these two groups have employed reporting verbs in their studies

1.4 Research questions

The main two questions addressed in this thesis were:

1 What are the differences in terms of frequency of reporting verbs in TESOL research articles written by non-native and native English authors?

2 What are the semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs employed in the above-mentioned TESOL research articles?

1.5 Scope of the study

This study adopted sixty (60) articles in the field of TESOL that have been published on international journals (30 articles from non-native writers and 30 articles from native English writers) This thesis only researches the frequency and the semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs used in these corpora

1.6 Significance of the study

Manan and Noor (2014) found that English academic writing asks the non-native English writers should be very excellent in writing to deal with the challenges in this field Thus, the research articles need to be supported by the other scholars' ideas similar to the research issues In this case, reporting verbs are to report these ideas and claims, also show the writers‘ attitudes towards those ideas From this point of view, we can see reporting verbs play an important role in academic research articles

Theoretically, the thesis might make a contribution to the field of TESOL that offers some insights into the semantic dimensions of reporting verbs adopted in

these academic articles According to the researcher‘s examination, there have been few studies on reporting verbs and their semantic dimensions in TESOL research articles in Vietnam Reporting verbs were adopted to research in this study to evaluate its value in the research articles and the way non-native and native English writers use them, from which we can find how to use the reporting verbs appropriately in each situation Hence, the study of reporting verbs in TESOL research articles will help readers to see insights into the use of reporting verbs in academic research articles

Practically, this thesis may benefit non-native English students, especially Vietnamese EFL students and novice researchers That is, the findings to some extent help them know how to use reporting verbs precisely in their theses or research in the future Besides, this study would like to be a reference for EFL teachers who give instructions on how to use reporting verbs in research articles according to the standard framework

1.7 Definition of the key terms

Citation is re-writing the others‘ works in the studies with the sources Corpus refers to 60 academic research articles in the field of TESOL

with 30 articles from non-native English writers (the writers who come from Iran, Persia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Somalia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Singapore, Libya, Israel) and the other 30 articles were written by native English writers (who come from Australia, United Kingdom, United States of America)

Native English writers are the writers who come from countries (e.g

America, Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand), where English language is spoken as a native language

Non-native English writers are the writers in the countries where

English is not used as the main language including the writers who come from Iran, Persia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Somalia, Brazil,

Bangladesh, Singapore, Libya, and Israel

Reporting verb is a verb (e.g say, tell, believe, reply, respond, or ask)

which is used to indicate that discourse is being quoted or paraphrased

Semantic dimensions in this thesis include Affectedness, Speech Act,

Formality and Explicitness of the reporting verbs used in 60 research articles

TESOL means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

TESOL research articles are studies conducted on teaching

methodologies

1.8 Organization of the Thesis

This thesis comprises five separate chapters

Chapter 1 - Introduction - provides an introduction to the thesis of the overview of reporting verbs are used in the TESOL research articles, indicates the reason to choose the reporting verbs topic in the ‗background to the study‘ part, state the problems that lead to conduct this thesis, provides the importance of reporting verbs and the way to use them in the academic research precisely Scope

of the study indicates that the TESOL field is adopted to conduct the study and following is the definition of some important keywords

In Chapter 2 - Literature Review - the researcher reviews some of the significant studies in the field of reporting verbs The definition of the reporting verbs provided by some famous scholars in academic researches Then the categorized types of reporting verbs and the semantic dimensions of reporting verbs are discussed Previous studies present some major researches from a lot of authors who are professional in researching this topic The conceptual framework gives an overview of researching frequency and semantic dimensions of reporting verbs

Chapter 3 – Methodology - includes the research designs part shows the research methods applied in this thesis, sample and sampling procedures part indicates how the researchers collected the corpus and the size of the corpus Moreover, in this chapter, the data collection and the data analysis procedures is

described in detail Then the reliability and validity part is presented to make sure the research results are valid and reliable

Chapter 4 – Results and Discussion - focuses on analyzing the corpus to find the most frequent reporting verbs are used in the TESOL research articles written by non-native and native English writers, and the semantic dimensions of each reporting verbs are used

Chapter 5 – Conclusion and Recommendations - shows the main findings and conclusions of this study in relation to research questions and the limitations and recommendations for further research

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

There are four main parts in Chapter 2 - Literature Review The first one

is the definition of reporting verbs which defines what the reporting verbs are and their roles in academic writing and research The second part presents types of reporting verbs Third part is semantic dimensions of reporting verbs addressing original utterance, specification of attitudes toward the complement clause, and strength of the complement Lastly, previous studies are presented, and conceptual framework gives an overview of the main points of Chapter 2

2.1 Definition of reporting verbs

Charles (2006) defines the reporting verbs as a tool ―to give credit to other researchers to use their work in the cumulative construction of knowledge‖ (p.326) while Hyland (1999) and Thompson and Ye (1991) argue that reporting verbs which show writers‘ behavior to the other researchers‘ works are very important linguistic features Also, Hyland (2005) defines reporting verbs as a lexical device to help the writers to state their viewpoints and connect with the readers These definitions support each other, thus give us insightful understanding

of reporting verbs used in the research articles

In academic writing, reporting verbs, also known as introductory verbs, are used is to acknowledge and reveal the source of previous researches The investigation of Thompson and Ye (1991) has shown that reporting verbs help the writers show their attitude and evaluation on the statements of the other works In Swales and Feak study (2004, p.164), it also shows that the reporting verbs ―reveals your personal stance toward the source material‖ On the other hand, reporting verbs play a role to show the writers‘ feelings The present findings seem to be consistent with other research which found the reporting verbs are the grammatical device for the writers can use to have an effect for their academic researches (Hyland, 1998) Hyland (1999, 2002) found that reporting verbs can be adopted to report their statements and ideas, also demonstrate their feelings and attitude

towards the others‘ statements (Hyland, 2002)

To sum up, reporting verbs, are verbs used when scholars report or mention other writers‘ statements and ideas that the researchers agree with Using the reporting verbs in their written study can help reflect their attitude toward information that originates or helps scholars speak their opinion or reasoning better

in public assigned This definition and discussion are great to mention about

reporting verbs Therefore, the author take this concept for the study

2.2 Types of reporting verbs

2.2.1 Overview of the popular frameworks

Reporting verbs used in most of the studies are categorized based on the common frameworks of Thompson and Ye (1991) or Hyland (1999) Thompson and

Ye (1991) conducted the first research on categorizing reporting verbs of their semantic differences divided reporting verbs into three groups: Textual verbs, Mental verbs and Research verbs Thompson and Ye (1991) showed a statement that

―Textual verbs are those that have an obligatory component of verbal expression‖

such as state, indicate - the stance of the writer, while Mental verbs show us the thoughts of the author such as believe, think - the stance of the author whose claims

are being reported The third group is Research verbs which describe the research

activity or experimental procedures, for example, like find, explore - the

interpretation of the writer

Hyland (1999) identifies three types of reporting verbs based on Thompson and Ye (1991); however, he uses the terms Discourse and Cognition instead of Textual and Mental, respectively Hyland still uses the word Research verb for the reporting verbs group which mention about the research activities or experimental procedures, for example: find, demonstrate

In the Research Acts group, there are: factive verbs to show their

acceptance of the author‘s results or conclusions (Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan & Pramoolsook, 2015), counter-factive verbs are to show that the writers do not accept

the viewpoint of the other authors, and the last one is non-factive, which used to

make remarks of the previous research used in their articles

The reporting verbs in the Cognitive Acts described the studies which were cited of mental process (Hyland, 2002), and the last group is Discourse Acts

that show the writers‘ point of view, which were aimed to evaluate the cited works

by either ―taking responsibility for his or her interpretation by conveying their uncertainty or assurance of the correctness of the claims reported or attributing a qualification to the author‖ (Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan, 2017, p.38), divided into

Doubt, includes Tentative verbs, such as suggest, indicate; and Critical verbs such

as exaggerate - not make point), Assurance to inform the author‘s position (non-factive) and ―support the writer‘s own view‖, and Counters for the writers to

give the ―objections or reservations‖ to the author‘s ideas

In addition, Hyland (2002) has a detailed explanation for each verb group Reporting verbs of Cognition Acts show the cited works in terms of mental process The writers do not need to take explicit stance on the statements which are reported They could attribute their own attitude to the cited statements from the other‘s works In his research, Hyland (2002) offer four options for the writers to express their thoughts of the reported proposition

In the first option, the reporting verbs show the positive attitude and/or accept the reported statements in the studies: know, think, agree, hold, concur and understand The second option expresses the tentative attitude to the ideas or statements from the other works such as doubt, believe, suppose, suspect and speculate The third option of reporting verbs in Cognition Acts shows the critical comments with the negative attitude with the cited ideas: disagree, dispute, not think, etc Finally, the last group shows the writers' neutral attitude towards the opinions from the other authors such as picture, conceive, anticipate, reflect and state In the case of this study, reporting verbs employed are the attitude towards claim type, as Lewin (2005, p.173) said: ―a reflection of truth‖

Figure 2.1: Categories of Reporting Verbs (Hyland, 2002, p 119)

Figure 2.1 shows the study of Hyland in 2002 categorized the reporting verbs There are three main categories: Research Acts, Cognition Acts and Discourse Acts verbs The Research Acts category includes the reporting verbs are used in Findings type and Procedures type, in Findings: Factive verbs are to show the acceptance of the cited works, Counter-factive verbs are to judge the incorrect

or wrong statements and Non-factive adopted to comment the research findings Cognition Acts category includes four types: Positive, Critical, Tentative, Neutral These all types used to express the authors‘ attitudes and feelings with the others‘ works in the research The third category Discourse Acts contains Doubt, Assurance, and Counters Doubt type includes Tentative - to give the question, assumption or suggest and Critical - means not make the point Assurance to inform the author‘s position and support the writer‘s view, and Counters for the writers to give the objections or reservations to the author‘s ideas

Furthermore, a framework of categorizing the reporting verbs which is different from all the frameworks are mentioned above, is the theoretical framework

of Francis, Hunston & Manning‘s (1996) classification of reporting verbs The findings showed that both Persian and English speakers use the Argue group of reporting verbs most frequently, as compared to the other groups of reporting verbs The results also indicated that while native English writers show a tendency toward Think verbs as their second priority, the native Persian writers are more oriented towards the use of Find verbs as their second priority

Argue verbs are used most in communication and even in writing

Example: suggest, point out and indicate

Think verbs are used to show the writer‘s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs

Example: think, assume and believe

Show verbs are to indicate a situation or a fact in research cases

Example: ―show, demonstrate and reveal‖ (Francis et al., 1996)

Find verbs describes what the writers find in research or what they think

Example: find, discover, establish

These findings suggest that in general three frameworks above have given us a clear overview of the way reporting verbs are categorized Although the frameworks of Hyland and Thompson and Ye are adopted commonly in most of research in the world, this thesis adopt the framework from Francis, Huston and Manning (1996) to categorize the reporting verbs because of its high relation to the semantic dimensions which will be analyzed in this thesis The researchers used the reporting verbs classification of Francis, Hunston & Manning (1996) as a theoretical framework

Figure 2.2：Verb “that clause” pattern (Francis, Hunston, & Manning 1996)

In Figure 2.1, Verb That-Clause Pattern is named reporting verbs, and there are four kinds of reporting verbs group: ARGUE group, THINK group and SHOW / FIND group The SHOW and FIND groups are placed in the same place; perhaps the authors who built this figure considered the meanings of these two groups are to indicate the results or findings from the research process However, in this study, the researcher splits this into two groups for analyzing the reporting

verbs in more details and precisely as Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996) The classification of Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996) indicates a verb from that clause, whereby the verbs are classified into four groups including ARGUE group, THINK group, SHOW group and FIND group

In academic writings, it is necessary to refer to other people‘s studies by using the reporting verbs Reporting verbs help readers understand the relevance of the sources in the writings and can help scholars reinforce their arguments

Figure 2.3: Degree of strength in use of reporting verbs (Sources: RMIT

University Study and Learning Center (2012))

Figure 2.3 shows reporting verbs‘ three common degrees of strength The first degree is tentative reporting verbs, this is the weakest degree These reporting verbs are hypothetical, suitable for being used to make assumptions, questions or recommendations, etc in the research The second degree is neutral reporting verbs This type is suitable for expressing the narrative sentences, or quoting the research from other‘s works without expressing the attitudes The last type - strong reporting verbs - is adopted to affirm, emphasize, or show the attitude and feelings towards the ideas that are quoted in the research Based on the classification framework of Writing Center of University of Adelaide (2009), there are three types of position of reporting verbs: Weak position, Neutral position and Strong position With the Weak position, the reporting verbs for example such as believing, hopes In Neutral position, the examples of reporting verbs are: thinks, finds, realizes For Strong position, the example of this type are: criticizes, emphasizes The details of this classification are clarified in the table of Appendix B: List of reporting verbs and their positions in academic writing This strength degree can support the writers to choose the suitable reporting verbs for each purpose: make assumptions, questions, offer recommendations, quote the other‘s research, emphasize an statement, etc

To sum up, Hyland (1999) classified the verbs into three categories,

depending on the type of activity they mention: Research Acts, Cognition Acts and Discourse Acts verbs Research verbs include verbs that test activity is carried out in the real world Such verbs, often occurring in statements about findings or procedures, include observing, discovering, announcing, displaying, analyzing, calculating, assaying, discovering, graphing and recovery According to Hyland (2002), is associated with researchers on mental processes such as news, conceptualization, doubt, assumptions and views The third category, verbs from the Discourse Acts, relates to linguistic activities and focuses on verbal expression of cognitive or research activities such as assigning, discussing, hypothesizing, report, status) While the classification of Francis, Hunston and Manning, which has four types of reporting verbs: Argue verbs, Find verbs, Think verbs, Show verbs, was

adopted officially as the framework for classifying the types of reporting verbs in this thesis

2.3 Semantic dimensions of reporting verbs

Semantic dimensions of reporting verbs attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speaker of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her (Charles, 1998)

It is possible to see academic vocabulary that adds details and nuances to common verbs In addition, using specific meaning words will express more clearly than the purpose of the sentence (Vermette, 2015) Another case when talking about professional issues, writers can also find words with more specific meaning Therefore, when writing or speaking for academic purposes, the writers pay attention to words that are general and broad to select more specific academic vocabulary, increase persuasion for speech or writing (Whitaker, 2009)

This research finds a way to investigate the meaning of reporting verbs,

or we can call it semantic dimensions of the reporting verbs that authors used in their TESOL research articles It is called paradigmatic behavior, it means the meaning and function of a word can be discovered ―when compared to the behavior

of other words in the same semantic field‖ (Bergler, 2001, p 3) In the research of Bergler (2001, p.7), the author defined the ―semantic dimensions are reflected in differentiae in dictionary definitions but they have to be carefully categorized.‖ Bergler categorized the semantic dimensions of reporting verbs into Specification of the Original Utterance and Specification of Attitudes toward the Complement Clause They are defined as follows:

- Specification of the Original Utterance includes: Voice quality: The values for voice quality range over the entire spectrum of possible voice descriptions; Explicitness: is a scale ranging from explicit to implicit with all shades

in between; Formality: values formal and informal of reporting verbs; Audience: the

audience can be public or private object

- Specification of Attitudes toward the Complement Clause, includes: Polarity: characterizes whether the speaker asserts the complement or its contrary, the values are positive and negative; Presupposition: refers to the status of the reported clause in the context of the original utterance, the values are new and presupposed; Speech Act: describes the roles for each reporting verb, shows in detail the thoughts of the writers which the reporting verbs express; Affectedness: positive and negative referring to the impact of the reporting clause on the source

Moreover, Bergler (2001) states that strength of the complement relates

to the reliability, certainty of the encrypted plug-in in the reporter's verb To claim, for example, has much less power than the state; still has lower power than announced

Inspired by these specifications mentioned above, this thesis would conduct four specifications were selected for an analysis, namely Explicitness, Formality, Speech Act and Affectedness These four specifications have the important role in helping us to decide what reporting verbs are chosen appropriately

in contexts (Lenci, 2000) The reasons for choosing only four specifications because they are the most relevant standards for choosing reporting verbs in writing research, also, the students can easily understand the meaning of reporting verbs to use them proficiently Specifically, Explicitness is to measure the implicit / explicit of reporting verbs the writers chose for their studies, Formality shows the formal / informal of reporting verbs to help the writers choose which ones appropriately in contexts, Presupposition in the research of Bergler (2001) means to refer to the status of the reported clause in the context‖, Speech Acts describe the roles for each reporting verb and the last one - Affectedness - impact the reporting clause on the source With all the roles of four specifications, we can assume that is the reason for choosing just four specifications in the research

To summarize, the semantic dimensions are briefly outlined in the previous paragraphs The list of semantic dimensions is limited to the dimensions

that affect the reporting verbs and may even continue within these cases Semantic dimensions are a subjective part; Different uses ensure different granularity in semantic dimensions (Parisse & Rossi, 2017)

Table 2.1: Semantic dimensions of the field of reporting verbs

The semantic dimensions of Table 2.1 fall into two classes, which will be called the essential and optional semantic dimensions Essential semantic dimensions are dimensions with a different default value than unmarked dimensions Those dimensions are defined by default by all verbs reported such as Explicitness, Polarity and Speech, and therefore part of the basic concept or prototype (Witzlack-Makarevich & Seržant, 2010) It is no coincidence that the default values

of these semantic dimensions are often considered a practical basis for successful communication The information is a default spoken action for communication, related that the outstanding information is clear Positive polarization for additional clauses is often assumed with the default assumption that what is being said is also being confirmed as positive Reporting verbs will usually only encode an optional semantic dimension, placing a specific optional dimension in the focus (Levin, 2009)

To sum up, Semantic dimensions include the original utterance, the original utterance situation, and the interpretation of the original utterance

First, it is the Original Utterance including Voice quality; Explicitness; Formality and Audience

Second, it is Specification of Attitudes toward the Complement Clause consisting of Polarity, Presupposition, Speech Act, and Affectedness

Third, it is Strength of the Complement including the power of the supplement relates to the reliability, certainty or reliability of the encrypted plug-in

in the reporter‘s verbs

2.4 Previous studies

Thompson and Ye (1991) collected more than 100 academic articles to research reporting verbs‘ semantic evaluation They only chose the introduction sections to find how writers use reporting verbs for showing their evaluation and their attitudes towards other researchers‘ viewpoints In this research, reporting verbs were classified into denotation and evaluation There are three categories in terms of denotation: textual, mental and research verbs

The other studies of Thompson (1996), Hyland (1999) research reporting verbs forms, especially Dubois researched about the forms of reporting verbs that the researchers used in citing the others‘ works in their biomedical research articles, the results show that there are four main forms were used: summary, paraphrase, generalization and direct quotation, among these forms, generalization and summary forms are used most in their studies

Hyland‘s research (1999) focuses on the choice of reporting verbs used

in the articles He found approximately 400 reporting verbs were used, and nearly half of this number just used only once in the articles He makes a list of the reporting verbs which used frequently and reported that the writers in humanities and social sciences use the reporting verbs more varied and more argumentative reporting verbs than ones were used in hard science

Hyland (2000); Hyland (2002) categorized reporting verbs into kinds And the studies of Nor and Noorizah (2013), Yeganeh and Boghayeri (2014), Ramoroka (2014), Jafarigohar and Mohammadkhani (2015), Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan and Pramoolsook (2015) focused on analyzing how reporting verbs are used

in academic research The way that many authors use reporting verbs in academic researches has been explored by several researchers from different points of view (Nor & Noorizah, 2013; Yeganeh & Boghayeri 2014)

Based on Hyland (2000) framework, they researched the corpus for their study comprised six theses completed in 2012 by Malaysian students who did their masters in the English Language Studies program of National University of Malaysia (UKM) The results of the study show that reporting verbs of Research Acts category had the highest percentage of occurrence (44.8 percent), compared to Cognition Acts, which 30.2 percent and Discourse Acts categories, which recorded 25.0 percent in total figures of reporting verbs of the corpus the authors choose for their study

The research of reporting verbs‘ semantic dimensions is conducted by Sabine Bergler (2001) The research ―identifies the important points about its function and general syntactic structure, they discuss the notion of semantic fields

in more details‖ (Bergler, 2001, p.2) The semantic dimensions of reporting verbs are the meaning in the dictionary of these verbs, but it has to be carefully categorized

The study of the functions of reporting verbs were conducted by Weissberg and Bucker (2007), and they show three functions of reporting verbs from their results: provide the background information of the researches, create a link between the writers and the readers for the study areas and link the research to the study literature In addition, the writers use the statements from others‘ previous studies to make their statements are more convincing and show the significance of the works reported

The use of reporting verbs by indigenous and non-native researchers has been compared in many studies to see differences in practice between the two groups from different countries Jafarigohar and Mohammadkhani (2015) analyzed the use of reporting verbs by indigenous and non-native writers in 63 articles on language teaching and applied linguistics The results of their study show that the

total and the reporting verbs frequency of indigenous and non-native writers are equal, but they show differences in patterns and verb reporting options

They also found that native writers used more reporting verbs in direct quotations than non-native writers Loi (2012) also did a text-based analysis of the use of analysis and analysis practices cited by specific Chinese and English research writers in the introduction of the articles The author found that Chinese research writers tend to use quotations five times lower than native researchers In another study, the reporting trend in essays was written by Chinese writers and native English speakers were compared in terms of uniformity and prominence, forms of reporting and reporting function (Zhang, 2008) The results show that more reports are used by British writers than Chinese writers However, Chinese writers did not use as many separate and inseparable quotes as Chinese writers

In another research of Manan and Noor (2014), they investigated the use

of reporting verbs in Master‘s theses written by Malaysian students Manan and Noor found that Master‘s students were familiar with the reporting verbs from the Research Acts category than the reporting verbs from the Cognition Acts and the

Discourse Acts categories

The study of Yeganeh and Boghayeri (2014) is a type of comparing

between different cultures, they use a corpus of 60 articles from the field of Second

Language Acquisition (SLA), 30 articles from native English Speakers and 30 articles written by Persian authors, it is so called cross cultural study on the use of reporting verbs in the Introduction and Literature Review sections of research articles written by native Persian and English speakers This study used Francis, Hunston & Manning‘s (1996) classification of reporting verbs as theoretical framework The results of the research show that while English authors prefer Think verbs as their second priority, while the native Persian writers have a tendency towards Find verbs as their second priority

Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan and Pramoolsook (2015) showed that citations are made using reporting verbs they are known as one of the ways by which writers

establish the credibility or otherwise of the cited information They used Hyland‘s theory (2002) in categorized reporting verbs to investigate the use of reporting verbs

in the Literature Review chapters of theses written by Vietnamese students They analyzed a corpus of 24 Literature Review sections of theses that were written by Vietnamese students In this study, the authors found that Vietnamese students have used reporting verbs but not paying enough attention to their true functions

―Regarding the evaluative potentials of reporting verbs, these non-native English writers appeared to be unfamiliar with using reporting verbs to achieve the

communicative purposes of Literature Review chapters.‖ (Agbaglo, 2017, p.51) Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan and Pramoolsook (2015) suggested that explicit

constructions should be provided to help novice writers effectively use reporting verbs in their Master‘s theses

The ways non-native and native English writers use reporting verbs in their academic articles are compared in many researches to show the differences between these two groups from different countries In another research, Jafarigohar and Mohammadkhani (2015), using Thompson and Ye‘s (1991) classification of reporting verbs to compare the differences between the ways reporting verbs are

used in academic research articles written by native and non-native English writers

The authors collected 63 research articles from the fields of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 33 of them were written by non-native writers, 30 articles were written by the native English writers The results of their study indicate that the numbers and frequencies of reporting verbs between non-native and native English writers are equal; however, there are differences in the patterns and the reporting verbs types used in the articles, the result also showed the native English writers use the direct quotations more than non-native English writers Jafarigohar and Mohammadkhani (2015) found that the total number of reporting verbs was used by native and non-native writers and the frequency of these verbs was equal Such results are expected to somehow consider the fact that the size of the corpse for each group was nearly the same None English writers used five times more quotations

than non-native English writers, suggesting that linguistic background writers have enjoy research results It also explains that the linguistic diversity in the corpus does not have a special effect on the number of citations in the current study This high verb number shows the wide variation of writers in their citation forms In addition, high verb numbers not shared by both authors suggest that native English writers and non-native English writers follow different models and options in other authors‘ citation This situation may be used improperly by native English writers in the use

of verbs, or difficulties in creating academic discourses merit (Jafarigohar & Mohammadkhani, 2015)

Furthermore, Yeganeh and Boghayeri (2015) investigated which common reporting verbs are frequently used and their functions in the introduction and literature review sections of academic research articles written by non-native and native English writers In two corpora, the reporting verbs were frequently used with a that-clause complement in reporting the other authors‘ research As Maide and Zaynep (2017) summarize this study results Agbaglo (2017, p.51) commented that ―it was also found that in the Research Acts category the reporting verb found recorded the highest frequency, while suggest and states emerged first with respect

to frequency of occurrence in the Cognition Acts category and the Discourse Acts category respectively‖

Maide and Zeynep (2017) analyzed the contrastive corpus-based of the use of reporting verbs between native and non-native English language teaching researchers Their research is aimed to ―investigate the most frequently used reporting verbs by native and non-native researchers in English language teaching and functional‖ to help non-native authors ―improve their academic writing skills‖ The authors collected and analyzed two corpora of 160 English language teaching

research articles published in international journals 80 of 160 research articles were

written by non-native English researchers, and the other 80 articles were written by the native authors ―The findings indicated that some reporting verbs like ‗revealed‘,

‗indicated‘ and ‗observed‘ are overused by non-native researchers.‖ The study did

not focus on ―specific sections‖, it analyzed all the articles in every part ―excluding texts associated with tables and graphics, references, abstracts and footnotes‖

Yilmaz and Erturk (2017) presented that the frequency of these verbs shows that native English researchers have used more reporting verbs than non-native English researchers Although the total number of reporting verbs is not compared in the two groups, the high frequency of the most preferred verbs in non-native texts may imply that researchers are not native speakers More reporting verbs than native The position analyzes of the most frequently used reporting verbs

in both groups also show that both indigenous and non-native English researchers only use verbs in neutral positions, except a verb has a stronger position in the corpus It shows that both indigenous and non-native scholars avoid using reported verbs in stronger and weaker positions

In the research, the author indicated that reporting verbs are analyzed as: Voice quality, Explicitness, Formality, Audience, Polarity, Presupposition, Speech Act and Affectedness Based on Bergler‘s (2001, p.8) taxonomy of semantic dimensions in the field of reporting verbs, the framework of the semantic aspects for this study are formulated as follows:

- The Explicitness is a scale ranging from explicit (to explain, to

elaborate) to implicit (to imply) with all shades in between (to hint, to suggest, to describe) Ordering of these entries according to increasing explicitness is not useful (and would, in any case, be subjective) A binary value explicit, implicit is sufficient; the default is explicit

- Formality is a ternary feature with the default value unmarked and

the two marked values formal (to address) and informal (to blurt out)

- Speech Act takes as value any of the generally assumed speech acts,

the default is inform

- Affectedness has three values, positive (to brag) and negative (to

concede, to admit) referring to the impact of the reporting clause on the source The default value is unmarked

These parts are called Semantic Dimensions of reporting verbs, the significance points of Bergler‘s research (2001) and the study of Yeganeh and Boghayeri (2014) inspires for my study at the same time

Generally, it is very important to use reporting verbs appropriately, from that the writers could integrate the others‘ works in order to show their knowledge and ideas persuasively

2.5 Conceptual framework

In terms of types of reporting verbs, although there are three main frameworks of Hyland (2005), Thompson and Ye (1991), Francis, Huston and Manning (1996), the thesis choose Francis, Huston and Manning‘s (1996) framework to analyze reporting verbs with four types: Argue verbs, Think verbs,

Show verbs and Find verbs because of its high relation to the semantic dimensions For semantic dimensions, this thesis based on Bergler (2001) categorized the

semantic dimensions of reporting verbs into Specification of the Original Utterance, including Voice quality, Explicitness, Formality, Audience; and Specification of Attitudes toward the Complement Clause, includes: Polarity, Presupposition, Speech Acts and Affectedness In this study, specifications consisting of Explicitness, Formality, Speech Acts and Affectedness are addressed because these specifications may help researchers know how to choose reporting verbs in suitable contexts Explicitness is to measure the implicit/explicit of reporting verbs writers chose for their studies; Formality shows the formal/informal of reporting verbs to help writers choose which ones appropriately in contexts; Speech Acts describe the roles for each reporting verb; and Affectedness refers to the impact of the reporting clause on the source

Figure 2.4 presents the conceptual framework for reporting verbs

Figure 2.4: The conceptual framework for reporting verbs (Sources: Bergler (2001), Francis, Huston and Manning (1996))

Types

Francis, Huston and Manning (1996)

REPORTING VERBS

Semantic Dimensions

Bergler (2001)

Speech Acts

Formality Explicitness

Affectedness

2.6 Summary

Literature review plays an important role in issues such as analyzing and finding new research questions, linking theory to research practice, avoiding ineffective research and access methods, ultimately propose research proposals and orientations for the future In this part, the author seeks theories relating to reporting verbs, types of reporting verbs and semantic dimension of reporting verbs Based on these theories and previous studies, the author builds conceptual framework for this research The concept of literature review helps researcher carries out the other parts including methodology, analysis for findings and suggestions

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

This chapter includes six parts The first part is research design which describes quantitative and qualitative methods The second part is sample and sampling procedures showing how the samples were collected and the sources of the samples The third part is data collection procedure that gives the processes of selecting data in details After that, how the data were analyzed is presented in data analysis procedure; and finally, reliability and validity is included to make sure all

the collected results are reliable and valid for the valuable thesis

3.1 Research design

This thesis of analyzing the reporting verbs is a discourse analysis Discourse is defined in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2001, p.388) as ―a serious speech or piece of writing on a particular subject‖ For the

―discourse analysis‖, Ali Alsaawi (2016, p.244) gives a definition which seems to be very clear and understandable:

Discourse analysis is the study of language in either spoken or written form Written discourse is considered an imperative aspect that needs to be analysed Cohesion, coherence, clause relations and text patterns are all parts of written discourse

This discourse-based research employed the corpus of TESOL research articles as the research sample Bondi and Hyland (2006) affirm that research articles are the sources for the genre analysis which used for investigating academic writings

In terms of research methods, the thesis was mixed-methods research including qualitative and quantitative methods Creswell & Tashakkori (2007) said that the approach design should be aggregated of qualitative and quantitative data to apply in the study for collecting and analyzing data The quantitative research method identifies a research problem based on the statistics and figures from the

collected research results, whereas qualitative research is to ―analyze the data for description and themes using text analysis and interpreting the larger meaning of the findings‖ (Creswell, 2012, p.16) Combining quantitative and qualitative methods is commonly accepted by researchers in recent years Moreover, a study which used both methods, they can support each other to give us reliable results Given the above-mentioned reasons, the mixed-methods approach was adopted in the thesis

3.2 Sample and sampling procedures

In this study, 60 research articles were chosen and collected from journals of TESOL which were divided into two corpora: 30 research articles belong to non-native English researchers contain 183,807 words and 10,262 word types, and 30 research articles were written by native English researchers have 165,838 words and 11,221 word types The total words in both groups are 349,190 words As originally estimated, two corpora must be more than 200,000 words that they can be analyzed for this thesis, thus the actual number of words meet the standard of this research

Table 3.1: Corpora description

Number of research articles

Number of words (token)

Number of word types Non-native

by non-native English writers who are Bangladeshi, Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Iranian, Israeli, Libyan, Persian, Singaporean, Somalian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and 30 other articles were produced by native English writers who are American, Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealander