Genre Analysis : Studying Authorial Stance in the Pakistani Research Articles of Business and Management Sciences

The notion of authorial stance has received much attention internationally in recent years which has increased its complexity in terms of its relationship with genre-pedagogy and genre-awareness. Metadiscourse markers are used by academic writers in order to build and maintain relationship with their readers. This is done by use of appropriate language either to influence them or show a certain degree of agreement or disagreement. The present study investigated the stance features as they appeared in the genre of research article introduction section written by seasoned authors. 50 papers from the field of Business and Management Sciences were studied in order to explore the language features projecting authorial stance or author’s voice used by authors. Hyland’s (2005b) Model of Academic Interaction was used to study the authorial stance. The findings showed that the authors used a considerable degree of stance features in their research articles. The study may provide some useful insights regarding teaching the writing of research article, understanding the concepts of genre-competence and genre-production.


Introduction
Educational-instructional system in Pakistan has been a neglected area of research and discussion since independence.If I turn back the pages of history, I will not be wrong to say that the educational pedagogy and instruction has been a phenomenon of not-so-important a concern for the authorities taking care of this extremely crucial foundation of our nation.This can be rightly said because the main focus of the Federal Ministry of Education and, hence, the provincial governments has been curriculum planning, curriculum design, accreditations from one after another nationally and internationally standardised systems, as well as financing of scientific research and development for hardcore sciences in a maximum number of cases.The point here is not to criticise the efforts the ministry and the federal governments have been making, but to highlight the fact that funding for research and development of teacher training and educational pedagogy is limited to mostly paper-work and formal records.Practical implementation of such theoretical ideas is not least found anywhere in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences.
Pakistani educational system is divided into six main categories with preschool being the first step and university degree programs being the final.Universities offering undergraduate and graduate programs prioritise and/or minimise their main goal to make students have an in-depth knowledge of core courses, i.e. the absence of teaching genre-awareness in the light of genre-production reflects a setback.Before I elaborate more on this issue, I would like to explain the term 'genre'.Genre is a term for grouping texts together.These texts are grouped together on basis of their similar features.For example, the genre of research article, abstract, research proposal and email are a few to name (Hyland, 2006).These genres are grouped together on basis of similarity of their structure, organization, pattern and language.Members of a genre family are said to have family resemblance which sheds light on the idea how cousins and siblings share same features as of everyone else in the family (Wittgenstein, 1980;1958).An emerging field of study is genre analysis which studies the schematic structures and linguistic patterns used by authors/producers of these genres.Knowing about these delicacies of language and pattern is called genre-awareness.If genre pedagogy is left neglected, I am afraid our educational systems will take a lot more years to meet the international systems of quality education, all this is being said through the lens of genre-research in the field of BMS.
When I say genre-pedagogy, I mean the techniques our teachers need to practice inside the classrooms to empower our students on writing or producing different forms of genres.At the university level, our students study core courses and work diligently on scoring the best possible grades and securing the most worthy a CGPA, but the problem arises when they want to study abroad after graduating from these universities.Any prestigious institution outside Pakistan requires a research article publication as a prerequisite.Our students are highly prone to failure there because they are not trained to write a research article for their said field of study.Their attempts, one after another, lead to failure and, hence, frustration, when their research articles, research proposals and other such documents of extreme importance and consequential nature fail to meet the international standards.None of the universities in Pakistan offers a course during the span of their four-year degree plan where they are taught a course titled 'Research Article Writing'.Learning to write a research article remaining within the boundaries of any discipline is a major skill which our university graduates lag behind in.The genre of the research article is the need of the day, not that I mean that other genres are less important.Studying and understanding a genre is called unpacking the black-box of academic discourse (Swales, 1990).Because academic discourse or academic language has to be very specific, precise, and focused, Hyland and Swales both emphasise on its technique-based instruction (Swales, 1984;Hyland, 2000).
Technique-based teaching of genre involves all important notions required by the target community.For example, if someone studies engineering, they should know the style of language and structures used in the discipline of engineering by the engineer's discourse community.A discourse community is a group of people from the same discipline who use the same type of standardised language which is required and, hence, accepted by their discipline.Likewise, someone striving to excel in the field of medicine needs to know the genre and genre conventions of the discourse community of medical experts.This includes knowing to write a research article, a research proposal, and/or other important documents which are needed to be a part of a particular field.Having genre-awareness means knowing the elements of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, latter being text-externals while former being text-internals.Intertextuality lets a researcher study the organisational patterns of text while interdiscursivity explores the language which authors use internally inside a text to maintain the standard and boundaries of the discipline.Both of these approaches are used to study a text through the analytical lens.However, this article addresses the genre of RA via the interdiscursive lens.50 RAs from the field of BMS were studied for stance features as proposed by Hyland's (2005b) in his Model of Academic Interaction (see Figure 1 in the Data Analysis).The model explores the type of language which authors from the field of BMS prefer to use in order to build their authorial stance and reader engagement.Stance, also called 'author's voice' is the term which advocates how authors of a particular genre take a position to communicate certain messages to their readers (Hyland, 2001).The markers of Engagement determine the presence of potential readers within the text (Hyland, 2002a).It focuses on treating a genre's readers as participants.This article has explored stance features only.Genre-awareness, in term of RA writing, empowers authors to produce genre(s) in a more systematic manner (Allami & Serajfard, 2012).The higher education system of Pakistan and Pakistani universities need to adopt the approach offered by genre analysts.Although an emerging field of study it is, the scope it stretches and the opportunities it offers to the educational-instructional-pedagogy is immaculate.

Background of the Study
The discipline of business and management sciences has a lot of scope nationally and internationally.It is important to look at how the discipline achieved the status it has today.In this regard, I would like my readers to have a look at where the discipline started to gain fame and value from.It was the work of Chandler (1962) which brought worldwide fame to the field.His career spanned over more than six decades during which he worked on influential monographs and had multiple research publications.His works are considered to be the powerhouse for organizational sociologists and business management researchers (Bellah, 1967).He is believed to be the guru of business and management studies (Fligstein, 2008).In the recent past, Friedman, Bowden and Jones (2003) at Harvard worked collaboratively to develop some useful and practical research and teaching techniques in Asian, American and Latin-American cultures.
In an international context, Barbero's (2008) work in Latin America was given much importance by the international community.He studied the development of business and the discipline of business studies from the 1960s to 2007.According to him, it was not until the 1980s that the Latin-American business got rid of the title of being under-developed and disoriented.Toms, Wilson and Wright (2015) state that business history in England started in 1958 after the journal publication by the University of Liverpool.It was only after that when latest management strategies and themes started to incorporate their ideas with the English business, networks, corporate governance, human resource management and marketing.
In a national context, the scope of business and management is vast.Pakistan is the country with a rich history but with a lot of ups and downs as it was given only 34 out of 921 working industrial units at the time of partition in 1947.It has gone through multiple phases during the establishment of its business and industry.However, after that, its educational sector has flourished a lot as it offers students of business and management sciences some options to choose from including marketing, finance, banking, human resource and consultation.With Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, being the first one of its own kind of establishment in Pakistan in 1955, Pakistan has some very prestigious institutes of business and management including Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore, Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Sciences and Technology (SZABIST), Karachi, Sukkur Institute of Business Administration, Sukkar, and Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar.All these and many other institutes produce a large number of graduates every year, but one thing is common about many of these graduates.They have not received formal education or instruction on the writing of research article in the light of their discourse community.In other words, they are not genre-competent regarding research article production.
The main purpose of writing this article is to educate, and aware our discourse community of English language teachers about the importance this very genre of research article writing holds.Keeping that in mind and elaborating more on the importance of genre-based instruction and its competence, the coming sections shed light on some of the recent studies conducted worldwide.
1.1.1Function of Interaction Navidi and Ghafoori (2015) explored the features of stance and engagement by comparatively studying the two part-genres (when a part of a genre is explored), i.e. introduction and discussion sections of research articles from the field of applied linguistics at an Iranian university.Through the study of a sample of 60 articles, they came up with like conclusions as by the studies from several researchers in the recent past, i.e. the stance and engagement markers or features should be highlighted and emphasized upon for the production of any research article.In Pakistani context, it is the need of the day to understand the importance of these features which if inculcated and incorporated in our genre-based pedagogy, can bring marvelous changes towards the better future of our young graduates.The researchers also concluded that appropriate knowledge of accurate use of stance and engagement features would help authors/writers produce generically, strategically, and linguistically more influential research articles.

Studying Metadiscourse
Another similar study by Sayah and Hashemi (2014) in the fields of sociology, linguistics, and education investigated 90 research articles to find out that the features suggested by Hyland in his model were present but with much variation in these disciplines.The presence of persuasive stance was much obvious, but self-mention was not found in articles by Persian writers.Strategies like the use of passive voice and careful style of expression of opinion were used as well.In the research articles from the field of sociology, self-mentioning pronouns were used as the most efficient tool of marketing.In order to reduce the presence of vagueness, modal verbs were used.None of the authors used the modal verb 'may'.In the research articles from authors in the field of linguistics, different conclusions were drawn.Verb 'appear' was used quite a lot of times depicting the passiveness of the author.Educational research articles used the verb 'think' for the like reasons.Sayah and Hashemi (2014) came up with conclusions of emphasizing the importance of teaching varying language structures and patterns in particular disciplines so that authors from each discipline know about the do's and do not's of their specific fields when it comes to research article writing.Connecting this research with the Pakistani setting, the message is very evident, i.e. the need of formal genre-based instruction at universities.

Metadiscourse across Disciplines
Akbarpour and Sadeghoghli (2015) carefully examined 70 research articles from 7 diverse fields of study.They eventually claimed that the distribution of stance and engagement markers appeared with a hierarchy of language use among and across disciplines.Strategies like the use of self-mention, hedges and boosters were emphasized the most, but variations across and among disciplines were observed.To say it in a nutshell, it is of crucial importance that Pakistani universities start to train first their teachers and then their students about the importance of genre-awareness and, hence, genre-production via the use of genre-based pedagogy. ijel.ccsenet.

Object
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Data C
The presen Sciences.NICE) from the journal

Types
It is the m both the q making th linguistic a BMS RAs

Data An
The model simple wo order to m language t Fifty intro for the pre These are words which express an author's decision when they decide to hold back opinions and statements of certainty and commitment.This is careful use of words so that their statements are taken more like the presentation of the information and less of an opinion.Out of 50 RAs studied for this article, 36 had a significant usage of hedges which made the occurrence of hedges to be 72%.The careful study showed that among the words indicating hedges and their usage, the one which was most frequently found was "May" in 28 articles."Can" secured the position of being the second highest most frequently used indicator of hedges found in 25 articles from the discipline of business and management sciences.Other indicators of hedges included could be, can be, might, could, might be, ought to and can be.Hence, it is safe to say that teaching of genre-based RA writing requires a good understanding of the possible use of hedges as the findings suggest.

2) Boosters
Boosters are words which refer to the strong confidence about a statement or fact shown by the author.It shows the quality of conviction as well as a commitment which leads to having readers' confidence because these words project a lot of assurance and force.Using boosters leaves no room for uncertainty or vagueness about any facts or statements showing information (Hyland, 1999).Words like definitely, surely, certainly are projectors of boosters.Such words were found in 35 out of 50 research articles from the discipline of business and management sciences which made a total of 70% occurrence.It was also concluded that sometimes words like have to, must and should be used to show imperatives which gave an impression of boosters.Main expressions of boosters used by these authors were really, should have, explicitly, significantly, extremely, particularly, ultimately, especially, necessarily, highly, truly, extensively, strongly, majorly, specifically, fundamentally, obviously, completely, clearly, seriously, actually and primarily.Use of boosters by 70% of these authors elucidates the importance of stress and surety about the topic under discussion.The boosters used by the authors from the BMS community can be seen in Table 2.
As Table 12, above, suggests how lavishly the authors of RAs in the field of BMS in Pakistan use the stance features, it is clear that the need to bring a change in genre-pedagogy is need of the day.To stress on the same, Figure 2 depicts the leverage these authors take when it comes to the use of stance markers.

Figure 2. Occurrences of features of stance in BMS research journals
After the comparative analysis of all the BMS RAs it is observed that features of stance are being utilized by most of the BMS researchers.The features of Attitude Markers are found in all the BMS RAs that shows an unavoidable need of the inculcation of words that depict BMS researchers' attitudes, opinions and dimensions of thought.Hedges and Boosters are also being employed by the BMS Researchers in the most of the BMS RAs.The feature of Self Mention is found the least that depicts BMS researchers' emphasis objective presentation rather than the subjective one.
In the light of findings of the present study, I would like to make a few recommendations to the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan, university teachers, students and future researchers.This study can be advantageous in many ways as suggested below: 1) HEC, Pakistan can use the study as a basis for investing in genre-awareness and genre-based pedagogy as we as a nation clearly lag behind in this area of educational research.If proper funds are granted to genre-analysts and researcher, more of such studies can be conducted at a larger scale with more data and more in-depth study.
2) The present findings can be of great help if university teachers expand their understanding of genre-awareness and help their BMS students with genre-competence.
3) Students from the field of BMS striving to learn how to write a generically-competent RA in their field can benefit from this study and explore the area more by reading more as directed in references.
4) For future researchers, it is important to look into the same genre with more depth and conduct research works of the same nature for other disciplines in Pakistan.They are also recommended to study other academic genres in order to make contributions to the Pakistani and international research community.

Table 1 .
Table 1, below, shows the representation of the same data in detail.Types of hedges and their occurrences in 36/50 BMS RAs