Conclusion Stage
Another peak of attitudinal density occurs at the conclusion stage, which is a combination of independent or optional stages such as Implications, Suggestions, Directions for Future Research, Limitations and Applications, etc. (Nwogu, 1997; Swales, 2004).
The attitudinal values as positive Appreciation, also prevailing over Judgement and Affect at this stage, mainly deal with the merits of the solutions suggested to solve the problems identified in the research, for instance, support from teachers, improvement of the classroom interaction and so on, with (a) as an example; on the contrary, negative appreciation is deployed to address the limitation and challenges of the research, apart from the difficulties both teachers and students in general necessary to be solved, as exemplified in (b) and (c) Evaluation of the character and behaviour of teachers’ and students’ responding to the teaching approaches during or after the research is expressed with judgement resources, encoded with positive or negative values. Similar the previous stages, few resources of affect were resorted. The eight instances reveal the positive emotions expected from students, as shown in when the problems identified in the research are reconciled, and the negative feelings which are yet to be comforted with the new teaching methods.
| (a) | This case study provides some insights [+app] to how teacher scaffold the students through effective [+app] use of questions during the implement of genre-based pedagogy in a secondary school of HK. |
| (b) | Firstly, there is a time constraint [-app] in the lesson. |
| (c) | Their composition can let me know that their vocabulary banks in their mind are still inadequate [-app]. |
| (d) | He learned that to meet his American writing professors’ requirement “Be yourself” [+jud], he had to shed his “timid [-jud], humble [-jud], modest [-jud] Chinese I” and take on the façade of the “confident [+jud], assertive [+jud] and aggressive [+jud] English I”. |
| (e) | They tended to be a knowledge transmitter [+jud] rather than a thought promoter [+jud]. |
| (f) | When answers are found, hopefully Chinese students can enjoy [+aff] the benefit of an improved teaching approach. |
| (g) | Gradually, they may complain [-aff] less about the decline of their ideas in writing. |
The conclusion stage is the section that mirrors inversely the organisation of the introduction stage, from specific to general, that the conclusion highlights the significance of the outcomes of the object of study, echoes the previous research works, indicates the implications of the study and exhorts readers to take certain actions. Therefore, evaluation is a salient feature at the end of the research papers.
Hood (2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2010) states that, among the three attitude types, appreciation is the dominant choice for inscribed attitude in academic discourse, and this notion is further proven in the effective paper corpus. The corpus also shows the encoding of judgement and affect according to the objects of study – classroom-based research in the present study, while the dominant preference over encoding attitude as appreciation shows the writers’ avoidance of personal judgement to maintain objectivity through their texts, echoing Lee’s (2006) study that representation of affectual resources through nominalisation and abstraction of affect in essays results in higher grades.