‘Glocal’ Rhetorical Practices in Academic Writing

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a wide typological spectrum of epistemic modality markers in a contrastive English–Spanish corpus. The article seeks to provide evidence of the way non-native English scholars adopt standard Anglophone strategies for modelling persuasion while at the same time transferring some rhetorical practices of their national language into their L2 English texts. This gives rise to a hybrid modelling of persuasion. In discussing the hybrid (‘glocal’) nature of ‘alternative academic written Englishes’, this article also considers the feasibility of codifying these academic Englishes variants for effective transnational communication. Further, it is argued that academic writing pedagogy should provide exposure to the standard Anglophone norms as well as to its culture-determined variants, since the discoursal heterogeneity of those variants represents alternative spaces of linguistic and cultural production in contemporary research writing.

Keywords:

• English Lingua Franca
• contrastive rhetoric
• academic English
• hybridisation
• codification
• rhetoric and composition pedagogy

Acknowledgements

This article is a contribution to the national research project FFI2012-37346, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. I should also express my gratitude to the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan for giving me the opportunity to conduct this research as a visiting scholar under the supervision of Professor Emeritus J.M. Swales. I also gratefully acknowledge the editors’ feedback on this study.