Mastering the research genre: from guided writing to accepted publication

Abstract

Literacy is inextricably connected with the practice of any academic discipline. The skill to properly use the linguistic register and rhetorical conventions of the research genre is important to achieve academic success and professional development in researcher careers. This is why, when students join a research community they have to become proficient not only in the lexical-grammatical characteristics of academic language, but also in the specific discursive conventions of each disciplinary … community. The present dissertation has two general aims. Firstly, the creation of a corpus of academic research projects written in Catalan, from Baccalaureate and University Master Degrees, in the fields of biology and history. This corpus is called TARBUC (Treballs Acadèmics de Recerca de Batxillerat i Universitat en Català) and has been digitized to be available to the research community. Secondly, by using this corpus, I have attempted to characterize the development of academic writing at different stages throughout students’ school lifetime. For this reason, I am presenting two studies. In the first of these, I transversally compare a corpus of research projects written in Catalan from Baccalaureate and end of University Master in the fields of biology and history. In study 2, I longitudinally compare end of University Master research projects, again in Catalan, with biology articles published in English. Specifically, I characterize the register and meta-discourse. When analyzing the register I use the following lexical-grammatical features: (i) lexical diversity, (ii) lexical density and (iii) syntactic complexity. Regarding meta-discourse, I examine the meta-discursive interactional function through linguistic markers, which indicate, on the one hand, the authorial voice as self-representation in writing, that is, stance, and, on the other, those markers used by the writer to involve the reader, that is, engagement. The results of these implications are discussed in linguistic, cognitive and socio-cultural terms and suggest that ability to adequately display linguistic register and rhetorical conventions in accordance with a specific disciplinary community is in itself a lengthy process.