Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Lawrence Cleary
Corpora and Discourse International Conference
Corpus-based and corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) investigate the employment of corpus techniques to shed light on aspects of language used for communicative purposes or, put another way, to analyse how language is used to (attempt to) influence the beliefs and behaviour of other people.
Siena, Italy
Chaired Session
2016
()
Optional Fields
30-JUN-16
02-JUL-16
“Writing identity: a corpus linguistic analysis of first-year Engineering students’ written coursework”

Students in first-year, first-semester undergraduate Engineering classes tend to treat writing instruction with some element of disdain, some students having come to technical subjects with the express purpose of avoiding such requirements. I have found some success by appealing to students’ sense of belonging, displaying samples of engineering research in tutorials, including published research articles and technical background reports, asking students to explain the author’s linguistic choices, focusing in on how language choices communicate the author’s membership in the engineering community. After all, ‘[a]n engineer is an engineer because he or she communicates like one and the same is true of biologists, historians and linguists’ (Hyland, 2012: 25).
Flowerdew and Wang (2015: 82) identify many of the applied linguistic approaches brought to bear on the discoursal construction of identity, CA, CDA and corpus linguistics amongst them. Whereas some approaches might serve to explain the social forces that influence form and content choices, “corpora are able to show how disciplinary identities are performed and recognised as legitimate” (Hyland 2012: 57). Hyland (2012: 59-60) enumerates ways in which corpus studies has brought to identity research “evidence of how individuals, repeatedly and routinely, position themselves in relation to their readers so that in constructing knowledge and relationships, they also construct themselves”.
This study proposes to come to some initial conclusions about how first-semester, first year undergraduate writers in Mechanical, Aeronautical and Biomedical Engineering in one Irish university enact, construct, and invent themselves through writing. Hyland’s (2000) model of interpersonal metadiscourse is used as an analytical tool for analysing three successive papers of 20 students (approximately 60, 000 words), submitted over the course of these students’ first semester. First, second and third papers will be grouped and constitute a sub-corpus for comparative purposes. This study will use WordSmith Tools to identify hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions in context. Writing instruction models secondary research articles and technical background reports as representative of the target genre; therefore, the frequency of occurrence of interpersonal metadiscourse markers will be compared to their frequency of occurrence in what are identified as Technical Papers (65, 731 words) in the Hong Kong Engineering Corpus (HKEC). This subcorpus of the HKEC will also serve as the benchmark corpus for a test of keyness. 
Results will inform thoughts on the linguistic strategies these novice writers find available to them and the direction the instruction might take with respect to those thoughts.
Resources
Coates, J. (1983) Semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm.
Flowerdew, J. and Wang, S. H. (2015) ‘Identity in Academic Discourse’. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35: 81-95.
Hyland, K. (2012) Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyland, K. (2000) Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow, England: Pearson-Longman.
RCPCE (2016) ‘Technical Papers’ in Hong Kong Engineering Corpus [online] available at: http://rcpce.engl.polyu.edu.hk/HKEC/advanced.htm [accessed 18 Jan. 2016].

RWC