An intercultural approach to “bad news” reporting as an embedded part-genreThe “local” rhetoric of Limitations in research articles

  1. Ana I. Moreno
Aldizkaria:
Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos ( AELFE )

ISSN: 1139-7241,  2340-2784

Argitalpen urtea: 2022

Zenbakia: 44

Orrialdeak: 101-126

Mota: Artikulua

DOI: 10.17398/2340-2784.44.101 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

Beste argitalpen batzuk: Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos ( AELFE )

Laburpena

Acknowledging the limitations of one’s own research in empirical researcharticle Discussion and/or other closing sections is rhetorically challenging, andespecially for those aiming to publish in a foreign language. This paperhypothesizes that a part of the challenge may be due to cross-cultural differencesin the rhetorical strategies used for presenting these potentially self-damagingstatements. Adopting an intercultural rhetoric approach, two sub-samples ofLimitationswere drawn from two English/Spanish comparable corpora of thistype of sections in the social sciences. Then, the rhetorical purposes of theirsurrounding segments were compared from the lens of the “bad news” message.The results showed that most authors prepared the reader for the Limitations,although the preferred stylistic strategies for doing so varied across the twolanguages. Authors also tended to exploit a similar set of rhetorical purposes, butin different ways, to persuade readers about the acceptability of their own studylimitations. Specifically, in English it was conventional to sandwich the Limitationswith “good news”, including implications for future practice, to mitigate theirpossible negative effect. In contrast, in Spanish it was conventional to surroundthem with explications to display the authors’ expertise, while the only salientmitigating strategy was their attribution to an external factor. These divergentrhetorical practices may be understood in terms of different cultural writingstyles and authors’ understandings of impression management that wereuncovered through email interviews. I advocate for a critical interculturalawareness approach to training scholars in writing skills necessary for researchpublication purposes in different languages and contexts.

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