An Analysis Of Author Comments In Four Science Textbooks, And Their Implication For Esp/Eap Materials Design And Writing

Abstract

This study focuses on the analysis of author comments. It explores one dimension of the communication situation, the message-sender's assumptions regarding the message-receiver, and examines the effect of these assumptions on the grammatical and semantic structure of English written texts. The objectives of the research are three-fold. First, it tries to assert the massive presence of the author comments in the academic genres of science with the aim of depicting their centrality in the rhetorical organization of this type of discourse. Second, it strives to clearly demonstrate with the aid of an analysis of authentic science genres the significance of author comments to ESP materials writing and course design. Third, it practically argues for a context-based approach for the teaching and learning of these micro-communicative acts. To have these objectives of the research realized, a corpus of 15 chapters from four science textbooks, representing the disciplines of Plant Biology (Botany), Animal Biology (Zoology), Chemistry and Physics were analysed. These textbooks were selected because they are considered to be key reference textbooks used by students and lecturers alike in The Faculty of Science at the University of Khartoum. The number of hedging devices (or author comments) were, therefore, recorded in each chapter separately, and their percentages (with respect to the total number of lines of a running text in each chapter) were also computed. A taxonomy of hedges/author comments was, then, proposed and 13 categories were designated.