Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 776 de 957
Preliminary (but exciting) Results
Discourse studies of this nature are often referred to as representing a “top-down
approach,” and, because they involve a careful reading of a large number of texts within a
corpus, are considered “highly labor intensive” (Biber et al., 2007). In order to ensure the
potential for valid and reliable results, results that can make a significant
teaching/learning impact, I have been engaging in preliminary research for last two years
involving a number of writing-intensive engineering courses. These are courses within the
engineering curriculum that require writing and usually a lot of it. Because of pilot-nature
of my results so far and because of the constraints of time (and space) in this paper, I want
to focus on one course, entitled Computer-Instrumentation Design, offered in the
department of Applied Engineering and Physics.
Referring back to Figure 4.23 above, there are three types of reports or examples of
microgenres that Martin and Rose (2008) believe are typical in science: a descriptive
report, a classifying report, and a compositional report. Each of these reports serves a
different purpose or function, each does something in particular. Descriptive reports
“classify and describe phenomenon;” “classifying reports subclassify members of a general
class;” and “compositional reports are concerned with . . . parts of wholes” (Martin and
Rose, 2008). Because at least some of the writing of undergraduate engineering students
(especially writing that follows laboratory research) requires that they describe the
apparatus and/or materials they use to conduct their research, I was drawn generally to
reports and specifically to compositional reports. Again in Computer-Instrumentation
Design, undergraduate engineering students are asked to produce four traditional genres:
a rapid communication (mini-article), a recommendation report, a progress report, and an
informational/analytical report. In order to conduct the research necessary to produce
those traditional genres, students used various apparatuses in a laboratory to generate
data for analysis. In response to my first research question, I analyzed three different
traditional genres, a rapid communication, a recommendation report, and a progress
report. That analysis took place over two years and included a corpus of approximately
140-145 texts composed by 45-50 writing teams. My goal was to determine if I could
identify the compositional report, one microgenre, in all three of the traditional genres.
Given the analytical framework, there are two predominate methods for identifying
distinct microgenres in ways that might be considered valid and reliable – move analysis
and schematic analysis. Move analysis originated with John Swales (1990, 2004) and
attempts to describe “a sequence of ‘moves,’ where each move represents a stretch of text
serving a particular communicative function” (Biber et al., 2007). Similarly, schematic
analysis “simply refers to the staged, step-by-step organization of a genre” that allows it to
accomplish its purpose (Eggins, 2004). Clearly, both methods describe a sequence or a
step-by-step organization. I chose to use schematic analysis because, especially in relation
to microgenres, it offers a more compact description of the entire generic structure – a
very formula-like representation – that would better serve determining if microgenres
exhibit a recurring structure that is consistent across a range of examples.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011