Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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experimental science journal articles include at least two of the microgenres listed above:
a compositional report or a description of the experimental apparatus and materials; and a
procedural recount or a presentation through time of the experimental process. Martin
and Rose (2008) claim that access to macrogenres, and perhaps even more importantly
then to microgenres, plays a crucial role in the ability of professionals and students-soonto-be-professionals
to participate in disciplinary and/or field culture. Shown below in the
reproduced Figure 4.23, they have even attempted to create something of a typology of
microgenres in relation to science (they have done the same in relation to history) in order
to facilitate not only the careful investigation of them as “interdependent and linked
constituent parts” contained within those larger genre sets, but to enable access and
through access authentic participation (Martin and Rose, 2008).
Method
Figura 1: A typological perspective on relations between genres in science
Within an academic/educational context, there are two general stages associated with
discourse studies that attempt to identify the “complex interplay between texts and their
social contexts” (Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010). The first stage is to investigate these texts
within their contexts in order to gain greater understanding. There are four steps related
to that investigation. The first is “to develop the analytical framework, determining the set
of possible discourse unit types based on an a priori determination of the major
communicative functions that discourse units can serve” in a select corpus of texts (Biber
et al., 2007). The second is to “ensure that the corpus [of texts] chosen for analysis actually
represents the discourse domain being studied” and can offer answers to the research
questions being investigated (Biber et al., 2007). The third is to apply that framework in
order to determine if we can “segment texts into discourse units” (Biber et al., 2007). And,
if we can segment texts into discourse units, then the fourth is “to describe their linguistic
characteristics” or their structure and linguistic features (Biber et al., 2007). These steps
are not simply sequential, rather they are highly recursive. The second stage, if suitable, is
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011