Seeking research funding in a peripheral context: A learner corpus genre study of grant proposal summaries

Abstract

Although the grant proposal is a high-stakes genre for researchers, there are few analyses available for consultation by learners and most studies investigate only a limited number of successful proposals written by experienced academics. This study reports on a genre analysis of a learner corpus of grant proposal summaries (abstracts), written by researchers who operate at the periphery of academia. The proposals were written by exiled Syrian academics and submitted to the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara) grant awarding body for research funding. A corpus of 102 proposal summaries was compiled consisting of 27 successful and 75 unsuccessful summaries, and a genre framework of three moves and ten steps was developed. Successful summaries were contrasted with unsuccessful summaries; this comparison reveals that unsuccessful summaries underuse the move Indicating the value of the research. Specifically, they tend to omit two steps: Importance (of the research) and Research Outcomes. All Cara summaries were also compared with Matzler's (2021) prototype; results show that both successful and unsuccessful summaries underuse the Methods step. These findings provide pointers to the genre functions likely to be most problematic for learners, and have immediate practical applications in pedagogic materials for proposal writing.