A multi-dimensional analysis of native and non-native academic research articles in twelve disciplines

Multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) approach has been widely adopted to compare linguistic and register variations between native and non-native researchers’ academic writing in numerous studies. However, only a few MDA studies have identified specific linguistic features for academic writing to develop an MDA framework suitable for this genre. To fill in this gap, this study identified 62 academic English linguistic features which were tagged with MDA tagger and counted by PatCount software programs to develop a novel MDA model for distinguishing native English and Chinese researchers’ research article writing. This yielded four dimensions: academic involvement and interaction vs. information density; interactive argumentation vs. static description; impersonal evaluation vs. personal opinion; and explicit elaborating style vs. simplified reporting style. It was found that native English researchers are more academically and interactionally involved; they are more interactive and personal, and they use an explicit elaborating style than Chinese researchers do. In disciplines of hard or pure sciences, native researchers are more strategic to freely express their author stance, but Chinese researchers tend to be conservative as they follow pre-set disciplinary conventions. These findings suggest that Chinese researchers should exhibit their authorial stance, interact with the readers with confidence and employ more interactive devices to make their writing coherent and explicit. Meanwhile, Chinese conciseness displays clarity and efficiency for native researchers prone to verbosity; Chinese impersonality offers objectivity where natives risk bias. This study also proposed a new method to tag linguistic features in MDA research so that researchers can utilize this method to develop novel MDA models based on their research objectives.