Comparing the situational and linguistic characteristics of first year writing and engineering writing

Abstract

First year writing (FYW) courses aim to prepare students for disciplinary writing. However, research suggests that FYW often fails to provide sufficient preparation for writing across genres and disciplines (Leki, 2007). A register-functional approach to corpus linguistics has elucidated key differences across disciplines and genres for both published and student academic writing (Biber and Gray, 2016; Staples et al., 2016; Staples and Reppen, 2016). To date, however, no studies have compared these features across FYW and First Year Engineering (FYE) writing.

This research uses a corpus of FYE and FYW texts developed by the authors. The subset for this study includes papers written by undergraduate students majoring in Engineering and taking FYE and FYW courses in the same semester. Technical Briefs (TB) and Design Reports (DR) were selected from the FYE corpus and Rhetorical Analysis (RA) and Research Reports (RR) from the FYW corpus. We investigated the situational context and normed frequencies of linguistic features hypothesized to show similarities and differences.

Our situational analysis shows key differences in characteristics of the RA and TB, particularly regarding audiences (clients for the TB, and instructors for the RA) and the object of analysis (advertisements for the RA and mathematical models for the TB). There were more similarities between the RR and DR, including a shared focus on a solution to a problem and the presence of both a methods and results section. Results from the linguistic analysis show the impact of the situational characteristics. For example, conditional clauses and premodifying nouns were used at similar rates of occurrence in the DR and RR, reflecting their inclusion of research questions and their sharing detailed information about the problem and solution. Implications of these findings for teaching in these contexts will be discussed.