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Article published In:
Register Studies
Vol. 5:2 (2023) ► pp.171–204

A multi-dimensional analysis of graduate student writing in two applied science disciplines

ORCID logo | Iowa State University
This article reports on a new Multi-dimensional model of graduate student coursework writing in two applied science disciplines from a corpus containing 1,108 texts and 2,008,316 words. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed five dimensions: (1) Conceptual Information vs. Process-Focused Actions (2) Human/Subjective- vs. Entity/Objective- Focus, (3) Attitudinal Monoglossia vs. Precisely Measured Information, (4) Social vs. Physical Science Approaches, and (5) Speculative vs. Finalized Events. The dimensions are analyzed functionally in terms of both register and discipline. The results demonstrate that course papers exhibit distinct patterns of language use, often attributed to the varying purposes of the texts but also related to disciplinary ways of knowing. Findings have implications for disciplinary writing research and representativeness of student writing corpora while contributing to an exploration of register as a continuous construct. The research provides an enhanced understanding of academic coursework writing for stakeholders such as professors, graduate students, writing consultants. (150 words)
Keywords: graduate student writing, register analysis, multi-dimensional analysis, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus of graduate student coursework papers (CorGrad)
    • 2.1Corpus compilation
    • 2.2File conversion and cleaning
    • 2.3Situational characteristics of GSW
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus annotation
    • 3.2Exploratory factor analysis (EFA)
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Dimension 1: Conceptual information vs. Process-Focused actions
    • 4.2Dimension 2: Subjective/human vs. objective/entity focus
    • 4.3Dimension 3: Attitudinal Monoglossia vs. Measured Data
    • 4.4Dimension 4: Social vs. physical approaches to applied scientific inquiry
    • 4.5Dimension 5: Speculative vs. finalized events
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.23003.bec
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