2Writing, therefore, has become a central element of university courses, as well asprofessional development programs, which necessitated the understanding of “whatthese discourses of the academy are, and what counts as ‘good writing’” (Hyland,2004a, p. x). These courses have often tended to focus on the general needs of students involved in academic studies, and catered more for university students atundergraduate level, who are not expected to carry out or publish research. However,post-graduate candidates who are engaged in conducting and disseminating researchhave more sophisticated needs in terms of language knowledge and related skills, themost important of which is producing cohesive and coherent written text.Written text is “the product of a series of complicated mental operations” (Clark andClark 1977, cited in Richards, 1990, p. 101), and is not easy to construct. Afterdeciding on a meaning to be conveyed, writers must consider the genre, the style theyare going to employ, the purpose they want to achieve and the amount of detailrequired to achieve it (Richards, 1990, p. 101-102). Nunan agrees that “producing acoherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing there isto do in language” and “it is something most native speakers never master”. He alsoacknowledges the enormity of this challenge for second language learners,“particularly for those who go on to a university and study in a language that is nottheir own” (1999, p. 271).The fact that language use is closely related to the social context naturally leads to theconcept of ‘genre’. Hyland characterizes genres as “socially recognized ways of usinglanguage” (Johns et al., 2006, p. 3). For Swales, a genre is “a class of communicativeevents, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (1990, p.58), and this purpose determines generic structure. This structure is in turn achievedthrough units of purpose, called ‘moves’ (Swales, 1990) or ‘move structures’(Flowerdew, 2000) which are fulfilled by lexico-grammar (Henry, 2007, p. 1-2). Keylexical phrases represent the move structures of a genre (Flowerdew, 2000, p. 374).Moves, in turn, are realized through different ‘strategies’ or ‘tactics’ (Henry 2007),which are tactical selections of the writer in accomplishing the purpose (Bhatia, 1993,p. 19). These tactics or strategies similarly necessitate the exploitation of lexico-grammar. Therefore, it can be concluded that lexico-grammar has a major function inthe fulfillment of strategies or tactics leading to moves, which in turn form the genericstructure of a genre, and thereby reflect its communicative purpose.The major role lexico-grammar plays in text creation requires a thorough analysis of lexico-grammatical features employed to fulfill different communicative purposes intexts, and this comprehensive analysis is nowadays viable through the use of a corpus,“a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or avariety of a language” (Sinclair, 1991, p. 171). Thanks to the recent developments incomputer technology, it is now possible for anyone to store large amounts of languagedata on a computer for analysis. Unsurprisingly, like many other scholars andresearchers, Hunston holds that “corpora, and the study of corpora, haverevolutionized the study of language and the applications of language” (Hunston,2002, p. 1).
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