Changing communicative purposes of academic journal writing in transition to multimodality

The past decade has seen growing influence of multimodality over writing for academic journals, as well as an overall lack of research attention. In our analysis reported in this paper, we position academic journals as a text space where genres such as research articles are accommodated. We focus our analysis on examining communicative purposes of academic journal writing, a defining feature of genre often used for speedy identification of change in the field. Drawing from the related work on framing (Andrews, 2013) and context (Van Dijk, 2008), we developed an analytic framework that can help capture and delineate communicative purposes, and then used it to conduct a single case analysis of a longstanding open-access academic journal, Kairos. Our analysis suggests that communicative purposes of academic journal publishing are rapidly diversifying alongside multimodality inclusion to facilitate scholarship transaction, not only among the academia but also with the public. We suggest that further studies be undertaken to invigorate this area of research by incorporating larger database or other methods, to provide more nuanced theoretical and pedagogical scrutiny.