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MACROSTRUCTURES AND RHETORICAL MOVES IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING RESEARCH ARTICLES
Abstract
Genre analysis has offered us valuable insights into the rhetorical organization of different genres. Regarding the research article (RA) genre in engineering, previous move-based works have shown that disciplinary variation is evident, especially across computer engineering (CE) sub-disciplines which often showcase unique rhetorical structures and patterns due to the newness of the field. Using Swales’ seminal move analysis approach (1990) this paper presents a synthesis of move-based works that have explored RA textual structures in CE sub-disciplines. The discipline-specific A-IMRD move/step frameworks and patterns presented in this paper can form the foundation of research-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogies and teaching materials tailored to the needs of CE students in academic writing courses.
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Academic work is usually evaluated by the quality of its abstract which serves as a concise summary of the research findings. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the rhetorical structure of Move1 in the abstracts of post-graduate dissertations from both Hard Science and Soft Science disciplines. The paper intends to answer three main questions: how is Move1 manifested in terms of its text length? What are the most frequently used Sub-Move patterns of Move1? What are the most common lexical collocations used in Move1? To answer these questions, the study uses Santos’ (1996) framework to analyze a corpus of 100 abstracts selected randomly, 50 from Hard Science and 50 from Soft Science. The findings have revealed that Move1 in Soft Science might use more sentences than those in Hard Science. The findings have also shown that both disciplines rely on Sub-Move-A, stating current knowledge, and Sub-Move2, stating the research gap, as essential for communicating their ideas while the other Sub-Moves were rarely used. In terms of lexical collocations, while post-graduates in both disciplines frequently used the Adjective+Noun lexical collocation as their preferred structure to construct M1, the use of the other lexical collocations varied in both disciplines. The study concluded that Move1 is considered obligatory in situating the research, establishing its context, and capturing and communicating findings. Besides the pedagogical implications suggested, the study’s findings hopefully contribute to the development of abstract move-schema theory, enhance scholarly understanding of Move1 characteristics, and guide future research in the field.
Academic work is usually evaluated by the quality of its abstract which serves as a concise summary of the research findings. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the rhetorical structure of Move1 in the abstracts of post-graduate dissertations from both Hard Science and Soft Science disciplines. The paper intends to answer three main questions: how is Move1 manifested in terms of its text length? What are the most frequently used Sub-Move patterns of Move1? What are the most common lexical collocations used in Move1? To answer these questions, the study uses Santos’ (1996) framework to analyze a corpus of 100 abstracts selected randomly, 50 from Hard Science and 50 from Soft Science. The findings have revealed that Move1 in Soft Science might use more sentences than those in Hard Science. The findings have also shown that both disciplines rely on Sub-Move-A, stating current knowledge, and Sub-Move2, stating the research gap, as essential for communicating their ideas while the other Sub-Moves were rarely used. In terms of lexical collocations, while post-graduates in both disciplines frequently used the Adjective+Noun lexical collocation as their preferred structure to construct M1, the use of the other lexical collocations varied in both disciplines. The study concluded that Move1 is considered obligatory in situating the research, establishing its context, and capturing and communicating findings. Besides the pedagogical implications suggested, the study’s findings hopefully contribute to the development of abstract move-schema theory, enhance scholarly understanding of Move1 characteristics, and guide future research in the field.
This qualitative study explores how the use of concept mapping can function as a genre knowledge scaffold within an experimental course that aimed to teach EFL undergraduate students how to read primary research articles in their discipline. Using semi-structured student interviews, the study explored the development of the rhetorical, formal, process and content research article genre facets of three second-year Electrical and Computer Engineering students after working collaboratively on three specially designed concept mapping tasks underpinned by the theories of genre analysis and metacognition. Our data suggest that the process of visual conceptualization encouraged students to engage in deeper forms of genre analysis and explore the different dimensions of the multifaced research article genre construct.
This study aims to delineate the rhetorical organization of research article (RA) discussion sections in an engineering discipline and explore the variations that distinguish discussion sections of high-impact and low-impact RAs. Research questions: What is the rhetorical organization of RA discussions in chemical engineering? What are the similarities and differences in the use of rhetorical moves and steps in RA discussions of high-impact and low-impact articles? Literature review: Some studies have been conducted using Swales’ move analysis with regard to the identification and textual comparisons of RA discussion sections. However, it remains to be determined whether RA discussions of the high- and low-impact articles within a single discipline display the variation in rhetorical patterns. Research methodology: A total of 40 RA discussions published between 2005 and 2015 were chosen based on five-year journal impact factor and citations of the articles in which they were published. Swales’ move analysis was used to compare rhetorical moves and steps in both sets of RA discussions. Results and discussion: The study identified the rhetorical organization of RA discussions in the field of chemical engineering. The findings indicate that discussion sections of high-impact articles tend to make use of the “comment on results” move. Explanations of the similarities and differences in the employment of moves and steps are provided. Implications of the findings are discussed.
While many genre researchers have examined the rhetorical structure of research articles in various disciplines, few have investigated the complete structure of articles for students in engineering, a discipline that includes a wide range of fields. Using Swales’ move framework (1990), this paper analyzes the rhetorical structure of 67 engineering research articles from five subdisciplines: structural engineering, environmental engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and computer science. Six engineering researchers participated in the study by coding texts of full-length papers into moves and steps. The study found that the abstract, introduction, and concluding sections and some of their moves were conventional across all subdisciplines. The finding of no common move patterns throughout the papers across the subdisciplines is explained by the differences in the nature of research in each field. There were, however, limited subdisciplinary similarities such as the use of Move 5, Step 2 observed in environmental, electrical, and chemical engineering. The study results provide practical pedagogical resources, a theoretical background to guide writing in an engineering school, and implications for collaboration with researchers in specialized fields.
This book provides a rich and accessible account of genre studies by a world-renowned applied linguist. The hardback edition discusses today's research world, its various configurations of genres, and the role of English within the genres. Theoretical and methodological issues are explored, with a special emphasis on various metaphors of genre. The book is full of carefully worded detail and each chapter ends with suggestions for pedagogical practice. The volume closes with evaluations of contrastive rhetoric, applied corpus linguistics, and critical approaches to EAP. Research Genres provides a rich and scholarly account of this key area.
This paper reports the integration of supplementary training in academic literacy, for those without the assumed entry standard, into a standard electrical engineering program without compromising any other educational objectives. All students who commenced an engineering degree were tested as part of their first session's assessment activities. Those identified as having inadequate academic literacy were directed to study a specifically designed credit-bearing course, which is controlled by the engineering faculty but was designed and is taught in collaboration with academic literacy teachers. Students who completed this course responded positively and also demonstrated measurable improvement in their communication skills. The approach has alleviated the skepticism about teaching academic literacy usually found amongst engineering faculty staff and has been adopted by the wider engineering faculty.
An increasing body of research relies on genre to analyze academic and professional communication and to describe how members of a community use language. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of genre-based research in technical communication and to describe the different approaches to genre and to genre teaching. While some research focuses on the textual analysis of genres, other studies focus on the analysis of the social context and the ideology and structure of the discourse community that owns the genre, and on the role of genres as social rhetorical actions of the community. These two perspectives are also reflected in the teaching of genre in technical communication.
A standard model for describing the structure of research article
introductions, the CARS (Create A Research Space) model, is evaluated in
terms of how well it can be applied to 12 articles which have received
“best paper” awards in the field of software engineering.
The results indicate that, although the model adequately describes the
main framework of the introductions, a number of important features are
not accounted for, in particular: an extensive review of background
literature, the inclusion of many definitions and examples, and an
evaluation of the research in terms of application or novelty of the
results
Examples are forms of code glosses similar to reformulations that help readers understand writers' intended meanings (Hyland, 2007) and contribute to the process of argumentation in texts (Triki, 2017). This paper investigates examples in research articles across the so-called soft and hard disciplines and aims to structurally and semantically explore the link between the building units of examples and how they could constrain the choices made across disciplines. To reach this end, the study investigates examples in a corpus of 80 research articles that cover four disciplines in the ‘soft’ sciences and four disciplines in the ‘hard’ sciences. Annotation was based on an automatic search of potential candidates then a manual annotation was performed using the UAM Corpus Tool (O'Donnell, 2008). Results suggest that (1) the structural features of exemplified units impose constraints on the choice of markers and exemplifying units (2) exemplifying clauses are more elaborative than exemplifying nominal groups and (3) the equivalence between the units exemplified and those exemplifying seems to be governed by the degree to which exemplifying units are expanding or compacting. The main conclusion is that the soft-hard distinction between academic disciplines is not always the major parameter triggering writers' choices.
Primarily motivated by the pedagogical question whether it is feasible to incorporate non-native English-speaking subject specialists’ support in China to address students’ research article (RA) publication difficulties, this paper investigates the extent to which Chinese expert writers’ RAs conform to the established conventions of international scientific communities in terms of macrostructure and rhetorical moves. The investigation uses a self-compiled corpus of representative energy engineering RAs published by authors on Elsevier's 2016 list of “most cited Chinese researchers”. Results show that (i) 86% of the RAs choose the IM[RD]C macrostructure, although other variant forms of the standard IMRD structure are used; (ii) nine of the twelve moves identified are obligatory, with frequencies highly comparable to the results of previous research on science and engineering RAs; and (iii) most of the steps in the moves are optional or quasi-obligatory, indicating that the Chinese expert writers not only rigorously follow the established conventions of international scientific communities but also use rhetorical strategies flexibly. Therefore, they could justifiably play a role in addressing novice researcher writers’ publication challenges. The findings also throw light on the disciplinary culture of research writing in energy engineering, which could be taken into consideration by EAP practitioners.
Recent research findings suggest that reading research articles (RAs) enhances undergraduate engineering students’ technical knowledge and fosters their lifelong learning skills. Nevertheless, the RA genre inherently displays challenging features for novice readers, especially EFL readers. Previous works on developing materials for teaching the reading of RAs to undergraduate students are limited and mostly report on the effectiveness of interventions rather than on course design and materials development. This paper presents the design and development of online materials for a Moodle-based, English for Specific Academic Purposes course that aimed to help Greek undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students to learn how to read RAs within their field. The materials design was based on the theories of genre analysis, metacognition and cognitive apprenticeship. Initially, a small RA corpus consisting of thirty RAs from high-ranking ECE journals and conferences from IEEE, ACM, Elsevier and Springer was created in cooperation with the ECE faculty. Subsequently, a move analysis was performed based on a simplified coding scheme of rhetorical moves in the target genre adjusted to the needs of novice Greek EFL readers. The results from our corpus analysis were used as the foundation of the genre-based materials that aimed at fostering learners’ declarative, procedural and conditional genre knowledge and included various examples of move structures and patterns, terminology, grammar as well as weekly genre analysis reflective tasks. We then created materials that intended to provide further support so that students could convert their newly acquired genre knowledge into procedural knowledge and explicitly taught top-down RA expeditious reading strategies and conditional knowledge by including metacognitive strategy training that intended to raise their awareness of when and why they should use the taught strategies. In an attempt to further tailor the materials to the needs of our students we included audiovisual enhancements in both L1 and L2 for presentation and feedback purposes, metacognitive prompts, online dictionaries and concordancers.
Helps both engineers and students improve their writing skills by learning to analyze target audience, tone, and purpose in order to effectively write technical documents
This book introduces students and practicing engineers to all the components of writing in the workplace. It teaches readers how considerations of audience and purpose govern the structure of their documents within particular work settings. The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields is broken up into two sections: “Writing in Engineering Organizations” and “What Can You Do With Writing?” The first section helps readers approach their writing in a logical and persuasive way as well as analyze their purpose for writing. The second section demonstrates how to distinguish rhetorical situations and the generic forms to inform, train, persuade, and collaborate.
The emergence of the global workplace has brought with it an increasingly important role for effective technical communication. Engineers more often need to work in cross-functional teams with people in different disciplines, in different countries, and in different parts of the world. Engineers must know how to communicate in a rapidly evolving global environment, as both practitioners of global English and developers of technical documents. Effective communication is critical in these settings.
The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields
Addresses the increasing demand for technical writing courses geared toward engineers
Allows readers to perfect their writing skills in order to present knowledge and ideas to clients, government, and general public
Covers topics most important to the working engineer, and includes sample documents
The IEEE Guide to Engineering Communication is a handbook developed specifically for engineers and engineering students. Using an argumentation framework, the handbook presents information about forms of engineering communication in a clear and accessible format. This book introduces both forms that are characteristic of the engineering workplace and principles of logic and rhetoric that underlie these forms. As a result, students and practicing engineers can improve their writing in any situation they encounter, because they can use these principles to analyze audience, purpose, tone, and form.
Background: Swales's Create a Research Space (CaRS) is a popular model for writing research article (RA) introductions. CaRS prescribes three broad moves—establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and presenting the present work. This study assesses the applicability of a problem-solution patterns (PSP) approach to facilitate Move 1 in CaRS by analyzing RAs in materials science and engineering. Research questions: 1. Is structuring an RA introduction using problem-solution patterns a common approach in published RAs in materials science and engineering? 2. How does PSP facilitate the setting of boundaries between territory and niche in these RAs? Literature review: Variants of CaRS have been widely applied to study RA introductions. Even though the 2004 version of CaRS has been deemed effective in describing the structure of RA introductions in a number of disciplines, its prescription of Move 1 may not be easily operationalized in teaching engineering research writing. For problem- or application-based RAs, the territory can be established with PSP while preserving other CaRS moves. Methodology: This exploratory study employs a text analysis approach to assess 30 RA introductions from three materials science and engineering journals. Results and discussion: PSP is found in most RA introductions. By integrating PSP into CaRS, the proposed model can capture problem-solution cyclicity as a build-up move for territory and niche establishment. Conclusion: Because problem-solving is central to engineering research, RA introductions can be structured using naturally-occurring problem-solution patterns. PSP-CaRS may serve as an effective writing model for RA introductions in engineering-related fields.
The written forms of the academic community, particularly the research article, are a frequent focus of genre research. Yet the criteria used to select “research articles” from among the different text types published in scholarly journals are not always made apparent. We argue that an elastic yet operational set of criteria for identifying the “research article” is both necessary and possible, and we offer a summary of our own process for developing such criteria in a project focused on the theory-practice tension in academic research in education. While genre theory's interest in variability may make researchers wary of setting boundaries, defining a prestige knowledge-making genre like the “research article” is not just methodologically but also politically significant. In unpacking tacit assumptions about what we select as data we become more aware not just of sampling biases but of which forms of knowledge we legitimate and exclude.
The study presented in this paper examined the macro-structures (MSs) of research articles (RAs) in Information Systems (IS). Unlike most previous MS studies, which have tended to look for a single unified MS model to represent the discipline under investigation and have provided post hoc explanations of intra-disciplinary variability, this study set out to examine how MSs of RAs in IS may vary with the epistemological paradigms they follow. Thirty articles of behavioural science research and thirty design science research articles were collected from eight IS journals. Their main sections were subjected to a series of analyses. Results show distinct macro-structural variations across the two corpora. Implications for teaching and future research of MS will be discussed.
Genre analysis has provided insights into the textual organization of different genres. In the research article (RA) genre, previous studies demonstrate that disciplinary variation is discernible. To raise the investigation to the level of sub-disciplines, this study addresses two research questions: (1) What is the textual organization of individual RA sections in corpora from three engineering sub-disciplines? and (2) What are the significant statistical variations in textual organization that distinguish one engineering sub-discipline from another? Initially, three corpora were compiled, consisting of 180 full length high quality RAs representing three sub-disciplines of engineering (civil, software, and biomedical). Then, the corpora were analyzed using genre analysis to identify the textual organization prevalent in individual RA sections of each engineering sub-discipline. Subsequently, units of textual analysis called ‘move’ and ‘step’ were quantified and statistically analyzed to capture significant statistical variations in each section. The analysis reveals the influence of the sub-disciplines on the textual organization variations across the corpora, highlighting the unique characteristics and perspectives of each sub-discipline. The findings contribute to enhanced quality professional communication by creating and raising awareness and sensitivity among prospective engineering students and practitioners when they are involved in the task of reading and/or writing RAs.
This paper presents an analysis of research article introductions from two disciplines in the field of Computer Science and Technology, i.e. Computer Information Security and Computer Languages, using Swales' (1990) Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model. The results of the analysis indicate that there is disciplinary variation in the structure of this genre, which has important implications on pedagogy. The results also show that although the CARS model adequately describes the main framework of the introductions, a greater degree of embedding is needed in this model to account for the structures found in the introductions analyzed. Based on the results of the analysis, a modified version of the CARS model is presented in the concluding section.
There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but also research-supported. An RA corpus consisting of 60 research articles from three major journals of computer science was constructed. A word frequency list derived from the corpus was analyzed to develop a vocabulary profile for the genre. Move analysis was also conducted based on a self-developed coding scheme of rhetorical moves in the target genre. The move codes were tagged in the corpus texts so that individual moves and move patterns could be retrieved for the purpose of developing research-based online teaching materials for graduate students of computer science. Numerous examples of specialized vocabulary, grammatical usage, and move structures that showcase and characterize academic computer science discourse were used in not only lessons but also learning tasks, discussion topics, and online writing models. The paper ends with a discussion of the usefulness and effectiveness of the online RA writing materials, based on student feedback and assessments.
Computer science graduates lack written communication skills crucial to success in the workplace. Professional and academic organizations including ACM, IEEE, ABET, CSAB, and NACE have stressed the importance of teaching computer science undergraduates to write for years, yet the writing problem persists. In this paper we provide guidance to computer science instructors who want student writing skills to improve. First, we organize prior work on writing for computer science into a goal-oriented taxonomy of writing tasks. Each task includes a clear, concise, and detailed model that can be used as the framework for a student writing assignment. Second, we provide general advice for incorporating writing into any computer science course. Finally, we discuss the application of our taxonomy and advice to writing tasks in several computer science courses.
Research articles and research theses constitute two key genres used by scientific communities for the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. Both genres are produced at advanced stages of individuals' enculturation in disciplinary communities present original research aim to persuade the academic community to accept new knowledge claims, and are the result of social negotiations between authors and disciplinary gatekeepers.However, despite their similarities, these two academic genres differ as regards the status of their authors in academic discourse communities and the power asymmetries between themselves and disciplinary gatekeepers. Awareness of these differences in relations of power and of the social forces behind the formation of genres, which are constituents of advanced academic literacy, defines the rhetorical strategies used by the authors of these two genres. This is revealed by a comparison of 17 research articles and nine samples of research theses from the fields of electronic and chemical engineering. The analysis of the texts focuses on the density and function of hedges and, in particular, discourse-based strategic hedges and of their personal or impersonal expression.The analysis indicates that students hedge more than expert authors and virtually wholly refrain from taking personal responsibility for their claims. Expert authors, on the other hand, hedge less than the students and often use personally attributed hedges. The comparison additionally indicates differences in the frequency of certain types of strategic hedges between RA authors and students.
This paper presents a discussion of an experimental, innovative course in corpus-informed EAP for doctoral students. Participants were given access to specialized corpora of academic writing and speaking, instructed in the tools of the trade (web- and PC-based concordancers) and gradually inducted into the skills needed to best exploit the data and the tools for directed learning as well as self-learning. After the induction period, participants began to compile two additional written corpora: one of their own writing (term papers, dissertation drafts, unedited journal drafts) and one of ‘expert’ writing, culled from electronic versions of published papers in their own field or subfield. Students were thus able to make comparisons between their own writing and those of more established writers in their field. At the end of the course, participants presented reports of their discoveries with some discussion of how they felt their rhetorical consciousness was raised and reflected on what further use they might be making of corpus linguistics techniques in their future careers. This paper gives an overview of how this course was structured, presents the kinds of discoursal and other linguistic phenomena examined and the sometimes surprising observations made, and reports on the pluses and minuses of this corpus-informed course as a whole, seen from the point of view of both learners and instructors.
This paper presents a linguistic description of the schematic organisation of research articles in the field of computer science. Forty articles from three different academic journals in computing research have been analysed; the results indicate that the IMRD (introduction-methods-results-discussion) pattern cannot be applied to research articles in computer science systematically. Introductory and concluding sections, however, are used in more instances. It is the central part of these articles which seems to depart more from the IMRD pattern. Detailed analyses of the structure of introductions, results, and conclusions are included, and relevant comparisons with previous studies are drawn.
This paper presents an analysis of the structure of computer science research articles published in the Lecture Notes of Computer
Science series. While it is clear that most articles start with an Introduction and end with a Conclusion, the structure of
text between these two sections is rather diverse. We studied the positions of different section types, and analysed dependencies
between them. As a result, we present a number of common patterns used by writers, and make suggestions on how to improve
the presentation of research in computer science.
Based on a study of nearly 200 international faculty in the field
of computer science and computer engineering, roughly 90 written genres
in the computing discipline are identified and organized according to
five central aims in the profession: generation, procuration,
dissemination, evaluation, and regulation. The importance of writing in
the field is discussed, and recommendations for further research follow
to encourage greater breadth and depth in the identification and study
of generic corpora characteristic of specific professional communities.
Benefits of such research assist students preparing to enter a
profession, working professionals wishing to improve their writing in a
profession, and writing specialists who offer training or editorial
services for a profession
Doctorate as genre: Supporting thesis writing across campus
- S Carter
Carter, S. (2011). Doctorate as genre: Supporting thesis writing across campus. Higher
Education Research & Development, 30(6), 725-736. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2011.5543