2022 - Pavel Adamek - Seeing more than just codes: How quantitative methods can help you with LCT

Newcomers to higher education are confronted with the task of learning the writing conventions of academic tribes. To make this largely tacit acquisition more transparent has been the primary mission of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which has recently been drawing on Legitimation Code Theory. To date, such EAP studies have, like the vast majority of research enacting LCT, been qualitative. In this Roundtable, I will illustrate one way of engaging with LCT quantitatively and show what we can gain. I do so to explore writing conventions in published writing in earth sciences. Drawing on the dimension of Specialization and on established EAP classifications of Themes, citations, personal pronouns and hedging and boosting, I quantify knowledge and knower visibility (prominence) and authoritativeness in 120 discussions and conclusions from marine chemistry and seismology experimental articles. The quantification shows, firstly, that while both sub-disciplines occupy the same specialization code quadrants, their positions clearly differ. Secondly, the spread of positions within quadrants reveals the range of writing styles of marine chemistry and seismology authors. The range thus hints at the degree of uniformity and variation in sub-disciplinary writing. Importantly, these results show how quantitative methods can complement qualitative studies to exploit the potential of LCT for revealing nuances among practices that occupy the same codes. I will also explore how these quantitative findings can be complemented qualitatively by utilising the concepts of insights from the 4-K model.