Pedagogical implications of evaluation in academic domains: praise and criticism in archaeology book reviews

The chapter analyses a corpus of 112 book reviews published between 2010 and 2012 in the quarterly issues of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, one of the leading journals in the field, according to the SCOPUS database. The discipline involved in the study is, then, archaeology, which, so far, has encountered little attention in linguistics studies. The aim here is to investigate how archaeologists manage positive and negative criticism as well as to indicate some possible usages of this kind of corpora in English for academic writing classes with a specific application to mainstream courses offered by Departments of Foreign Languages in Italy. The identification of single instances of evaluative language is done through the search and analysis of instances of appraisal. A quantitative method of analysis is used, along with a qualitative one, in order to study not only the kind of evaluative language used in the corpus but also the preferred evaluative strategies employed and their collocation in the reviews’ rhetorical structure. The research outcomes demonstrate that archaeologists tend to balance praise and criticism, preferring to mitigate negative appraisal by alternating the latter with positive assessment or a neutral description of the contents. Furthermore, the chapter suggests some pedagogical applications of the findings to students and training teachers not only in English for archaeology but also in mainstream courses on ESP and EFL. Thus, students are provided with as many disciplinary perspectives as possible in their training as future professionals who can apply a wider, flexible knowledge in ESP on the job market as also in autonomous life-long learning to ever increase their proficiency in English. Indeed, The chapter will indicate that the use of this kind of material in mainstream curricula for students of EFL is useful as it gives them a wider perspective on genres and disciplines that will prepare them effectively for postgraduate courses or their professional future.