Academic discourse in western research at the turn of the 21st century: evolution of approaches and concepts

This review paper discusses the concept of academic discourse as one of the most rapidlydeveloping branches in contemporary linguistic research. The objective of the review was to observe and analyze basic paradigms and approaches to academic discourse in applied linguistics, genre analysis and discourse analysis developed by British, American and European linguists and examine academic discourse issues. The timeline of the review includes three periods from the middle of the 20th century to the present. The focus on the Anglophone literature is determined bythe historical interrelation between academic discourse research and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and by an increase of national research of academic discourse and EAP. The review demonstrates evolution of academic discourse research approaches according to the time periods and domineering concepts. The review results demonstrate the contribution of Swales’ genre analysis approach to the development of academic discourse research and learning. The author indicates that current research into academic discourse obviously has a cross-disciplinary trend and is based on the combination of comparative analysis and corpus linguistics methods. The author makes a conclusion that this trend will remain a significant part of academic discourse investigation and results in an increase of national publications addressing the academic discourse issues.