Essay Specialised Written Discourse Literacy in Academic University – Arts and Humanities Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

1. Introduction 

This thesis tries to study the attributes and function of the discourse markers used in the proposals and research reports by investigating the corpora of written works at British universities by students of undergraduate and graduate levels. The motivation for this research came out of the inquisitiveness about the role of meta-argumentative expressions, particularly the discourse markers in academic writing. The immediate question arises – what constitutes a good writing in an academic context and how the underlying features can be studied? How does the student- writer engage with the form and content of the academic writing? What kind of functions and usage patterns of metadiscourse markers can be seen in the proposals and research reports (of native writers)? Hence, the research question is posed- how do student writer negotiate (linguistically) with the topic and the reader simultaneously and what are the grammatical patterns associated with the common discourse markers? The meticulous study of literature in this field of research pointed out towards the interesting yet not fully explored field of metadiscourse employing the corpus methodology. For Hyland, “Metadiscourse is an intuitively attractive concept as it seems to offer a principled way of collecting under one heading the diverse range of linguistic devices writers use to explicitly organize their texts, engage readers and signal their attitudes to their material and their audience” (Hyland 2005: ix). The research is a corpus-driven research which would examine academic writing. Here, the corpus linguistics is meant to be understood as a research tool that reveals the information and provides the perspectives on the research through the different tools assorted in the corpus engine. It definitely helps to analyze the large number of written texts with certain ease and confidence. This thesis focuses on the various expressions that signal the argument or play linguistic role in the academic discourse.  This initiated a survey of various corpus and finally, British Academic Written English (BAWE) has been chosen, primarily because of its large size (6,968,089 tokens) with “proficient assessed student writing” across “evenly distributed disciplinarily areas” (www.sketchengine.eu/bawe-corpus/).  Upon making preliminary key word searches and examination of specific argumentative vocabularies, it became evident that the corpus would yield sufficient results or show occasions of usages so the research could proceed towards analyzing and interpreting in light of the theoretical models in the field. 

1. Research Context

It has always been a matter of interest for the students, teachers and researchers to understand the strategies that constitute good academic writing. The answer to this question has never been simple theoretically or empirically. “Specialised written discourse literacy in academic university settings has just started to be explored in most countries of the world. Thus, one way to access disciplinary written genres employed by academia in varying settings is to begin with the assumption that all materials read in these contexts reveal relevant data about the means of written communication and knowledge organizations” (Parodi 2010: 65). Parodi put emphasis on the need to study the devices of academic discourses with an assumption that they shed light on the way message is communicated and organized in the writing or all other forms of communication. His study focuses more on genre studies through the study of lexico-grammatical patterns distinct to each genre. Although, genre analyses does not fall under scrutiny of this proposed paper, the ideas on the metadiscourse are at times borrowed from the researches on this field.