discourse reflexivity, research articles, English as a Lingua Franca

The paper aims to investigate discourse reflexivity in English-medium research articles written by L2 users of English. The study follows a large body of research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and focuses on discourse reflexivity as an important aspect of academic discourse, enhancing clarity and explicitness among speakers from different linguistic and/or cultural backgrounds. Specifically, the paper focuses on highly explicit reflexive expressions (Mauranen, 1993) which refer to the current text as a product, such as frame markers and endophoric markers. The investigation is carried out on the SciELF corpus consisting of research articles written by L2 users of English, which have not undergone any professional proofreading. The part of the corpus which has been analyzed comprises articles from social sciences and humanities. The findings are compared with a specialized corpus of published research articles written by Anglophone authors, which has been designed as a comparable corpus to the SciELF. The results should indicate whether the tendency to enhanced explicitness is only shown in spoken ELF (Mauranen, 2012), or whether it is an integral part of written academic ELF as well.