Learning to successfully construct stylistically appropriate academic texts in a foreign language is a challenge for EFL university learners (Hood, 2004). The study is an attempt to explore transitivity and thematic progression in selected medical research texts produced by professional published writers compared to university EFL learners. The current study employed a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) to explore TRANSITIVITY and Thematic progression in two sets of data. The first set includes five medical research articles by professional academic writers. The second set of data includes five research projects by Saudi university students. The findings revealed that the transitivity system plays an important role in the realization of stylistic features of medical academic texts and that the application of different process types in different sections of the paper may be related to the requirements and purposes of each section. The findings showed an extensive use of the Theme reiteration pattern, followed by the linear thematic progression pattern in both sets of data. The findings also revealed that the student writers expanded the experiential meanings by using tables and graphs to elaborate their meanings more than professional published writers. A number of other findings related to the relations existing between tables, figures and the text accompanying them were revealed. The findings reveal pedagogical implications that will hopefully inform the teaching and learning of English academic writing for medical purposes.

Authors:
Asma Alshehri, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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