Analyzing and enacting academic criticism: The case of an L2 graduate learner of academic writing

Academic criticism is defined in this paper as a statement which reflects a discrepancy between the stance of a researcher/author, on the one hand, and that of another researcher or the discourse community as a whole, on the other (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, 2003). Despite researchers’ awareness of the potential difficulty academic criticism poses for many L2 student writers, very few studies have explored learners’ analysis of academic criticism in their reading, their enactment of it in their writing, or the factors influencing their analysis and enactment of this defining feature of academic writing. To address these issues, I analyzed the reading and writing tasks of an L2 graduate student in an English academic writing class. My analysis of the data indicates that, when analyzing discipline-specific samples of research articles, the learner noticed the irregular presence of criticism in his field, highlighted indirect criticism as a discipline-specific practice, and analyzed the linguistic formulations of academic criticism. In his writing, he recontextualized the indirect criticism practices he previously noticed, but, interestingly, also built direct criticisms into his texts. The learner's learning profile points to his rhetorical awareness, disciplinary engagement, and the instructional context as among the strong influences on his engagement with academic criticism. The analysis of the data suggests the need for a more nuanced view of the influences of national culture on students’ academic literacy learning in general and their engagement with academic criticism in particular.