A corpus analysis of Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction in first-year, first-semester writing as a way of affirming or negating their characterisation of their own writing as factual
 

Engaging first-year Engineering students in discipline-specific writing practices requires inventiveness. Demonstrating how identity and membership is embedded in the language of accomplished engineers is one way forward. Relying largely on the scholarship of Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Gee, 1999; Halliday, 2014; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Lave and Wenger, 1988 and 1991 and Wenger, 1998, it has become widely accepted by scholars of genre and discourse studies and by those teaching or facilitating writing in third-level education that the process of learning to write in an academic discipline has implications with respect to a student’s epistemic and ideological values and the language the student uses to express their changing world-view and shifting identity(ies) (Bazerman and Russell, 2003; Dias, et al., 1999; Hyland, 2000, 2002, 2012 and 2015; Ivanič, 1998; Lea and Street, 1998; Russell, 1997; Paré, 2002). Hyland (2012) and Ivanič (1998) are two high-profile scholars who have turned to Halliday’s metafunctions to analyse student writing, Ivanič exposing mature students’ struggles in the acculturation process and some weaknesses in institutional practices, Hyland revealing of how students position themselves in relation to the discourse on their subject. The current study analyses three successive papers of first-year, first-semester engineering students in an Irish university (c. 130,000 word corpus) for Halliday’s interpersonal metafunction, to discern changes from one text to the next, and approximates the direction of acculturation into the community of practice through a comparison to a similarly coded reference corpus comprised of the recent publications of their lecturers (c. 150, 000 words). The analysis focuses on the degree of certainty expressed in each corpus to discern the validity of their own perceptions of their papers are ‘factual’, but will make note of other changes and differences revealed by the analysis that are relevant for the improvement of the writing curriculum.