Metadiscourse Features in Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Laboratory Reports

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-61-9_24How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Genre; Laboratory reports; Metadiscourse features; Corpus analysis

Abstract

Background: A generic analysis of engineering laboratory report’s (ELR) introduction, method, result, discussion and conclusion (IMRDC) sections can cover issues of various types of discoursal patterns; notably the linguistic features. An essential part of linguistic features of IMRDC which are often overlooked in ELR is interactive and interactional metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers.

Objective: This study aimed to explore what metadiscourse features are used by the undergraduate students in writing the IMRDC sections of the ELR’s and how these features are realized linguistically in writing the separate sections.

Methods: Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal and interactional metadiscourse model was adopted to analyze 35 ELR’s written in academic context. A corpus analysis was conducted using AntConc version 19 to determine the metadiscourse features electronically.

Results: The findings show unequal distribution of metadiscourse features with interactive resources more commonly used f = 1348 while interactional resources were only f = 797 in the genre of electrical engineering laboratory reports.

Conclusion: This study has attempted to better understand the way the third and fourth-year electrical engineering undergraduate students compose their laboratory reports by using the metadiscourse features. This research can be replicated to other studies in the engineering domain. The pedagogical implication of this study is that teaching and learning of metadiscourse features should be incorporated in secondary education and foundation level of tertiary education among scientific students.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - V. Veerappan
AU  - Chyn Chye Yong
AU  - Siew Ping Wong
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/26
TI  - Metadiscourse Features in Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Laboratory Reports
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication, Language, Education and Social Sciences (CLESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 252
EP  - 265
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-61-9_24
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-61-9_24
ID  - Veerappan2022
ER  -