SWALES MOVES:

The introductions of journal articles offer a natural place for scientists to shape their
story. Generally, scientists use a "create-a-research-space" pattern in these introductions,
as documented by John Swales, a linguist who specializes in advanced writing.
According to Swales, scientists use four standard rhetorical moves to create a context
for their work. First, they demonstrate the interest or importance of the research topic.
Second, they selectively review and summarize the previously published research
literature. Third, they show that the research is not complete, creating a "gap" in the
previous research. And fourth, the current research is presented as a timely and
appropriate "filler."
See if you can identify the four "Swales moves" in the following excerpts:
Example 1:
Multiple studies suggest that writers prefer audio-taped feedback on their
writing to traditional, handwritten comments (Dragga, 1991; Neuwirth et al., 1994;
Pearce & Ackley, 1995; van Horn-Christopher, 1995). However, these studies have
primarily observed technical and business writers. Moreover, these studies have not
compared students' perceptions of audio-taped comments with "live" forms of feedback,
such as student-teacher conferences. To assess the possible effects of different forms of
teacher feedback in a general composition setting, this study asks students enrolled in a
variety of English writing courses to rank their preferences of different forms of
feedback.
Example 2:
Since the late 1960s, a growing number of studies have examined the
interactions of gender and discourse in the classroom setting. While the results are not
always consistent, the majority of researchers have found that male students speak more
often than female students in K-12 classrooms (French & French, 1984; Sadker &
Sadker, 1985b; Spender, 1982; Swann & Graddol, 1988), sometimes at a ratio of over
three to one. This pattern of unequal participation between male and female students
continues in the higher educational setting both inside of the classroom (Karp & Yoels,
1976; Kramarae & Treichler, 1990; Latour, 1987) and in faculty interactions outside of
the classroom (Eakins & Eakins, 1978; Edelsky, 1981; West & Zimmerman, 1983).
Moreover, even when women do speak up, listeners are more likely to recall comments
made by men and even attribute comments made by women to male speakers (Spender,
1982). A frequently-cited reason used to explain why men so often dominate formal
conversations is that women are more likely to be successfully interrupted than men
(Eakins & Eakins, 1978; West & Zimmerman, 1983; Woods, 1988), although later
researchers have noted inconsistencies in research on interruptions (James & Clarke,
1993; Tannen, 1993). Researchers have also found that men often fail to use assent
terms to encourage and promote the conversational exchanges of others, resulting in
situations where women provide a disproportionate amount of conversational support
(Fishman, 1983; Leet-Pellegrini, 1980). From this extensive body of both quantitative
and qualitative research, many sociolinguists and others began to describe the ways in

which the subtleties of conversational norms work to reinforce lines of power that
appear to favor male voices.
Much of this research on gender and discourse, however, was conducted during
a period which many feminists today recognize as a period of unconscious racism in the
feminist movement (Haraway, 1991; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldua, 1981). In the
sixties and seventies, many feminist leaders were guilty of silencing differences among
womendifferences due to class, sexual orientation, or colorin the interest of
providing a unified female voice. As a result of this unconscious bias, prior to the
1990's, the race or ethnicity of the subjects are rarely mentioned in studies on gender
and discourse. Most of this ground-breaking literature on conversational interactions
therefore contains little or no recognition of the possibility that the discourse patterns
they describe are specific to a particular group or groups of women and not
generalizable to other segments of the female population. Although most current
research on classroom discourse now recognizes that ethnicity as well as gender affects
students' communication styles (c.f. Henley & Kramarae, 1994), we still know
relatively little about how these two variables interact to influence discourse in the
classroom. Assuming that most of the subjects in the studies cited above were White
men and women (the cultural default then as now), it is probably fair to say that
scholars know a good deal about how gender and conversational dynamics interact for
White students, but little about how, or even if, gender affects the participation patterns
of non-White students in classroom discussions.
Example 3:
In a qualitative study involving 123 students writing arguments based on letters
to the editor, Wolfe (in press) argues that giving students annotated readings can
influence their perceptions of the social context of a reading-to-write task. Students
receiving readings accompanied by evaluative annotations wrote argumentative essays
that were less reliant on summary and more engaged with the source materials than
students receiving the same readings without annotations. A follow-up study (Wolfe,
2001) lends support to these findings and further suggests that annotations reflecting the
viewpoints of two readers with differing perceptions of the source materials are more
influential than other types of annotations in affecting students argumentative activities.
However, the source texts used in these earlier studies of reading-to-write
activities were short, easily digested letters to the editor. How students might respond
to annotations accompanying lengthier and more academic materials is unclear. Will
these annotations help students view an argumentative social context for their writing as
the annotations in the earlier studies seemed to do? Or will annotations on academic
materials possibly interfere with students comprehension and retention of the materials,
as Reder (1985) suggests that elaborations sometimes do?
The current study attempts to address these questions by examining how
students written responses to an academic essay might be influenced by the presence of
accompanying annotations that evaluate the source materials.