Higher education institutions as academic writing communities: A study based on the analysis of master report titles
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.785Keywords:
Title, Writing, Academic writing, Master reports, Teacher trainingAbstract
Choices and decisions made when writing academic genres involve several aspects, including those concerning the title, such as linguistic structures, punctuation marks, communicative strategies, length. These aspects impact the achievement of the socio-communicative objectives of the genre and the projection the text may attain among the academic community. This study focuses on the titles of master reports produced by students of pre-service teacher training master programmes in four Portuguese Higher Education institutions. In addition to characterizing the titles and identifying their predominant features, it aims at verifying whether such features can be considered as identity and distinctive marks of each institution, viewed as an academic writing community. The study, based on a corpus of 800 master reports, consisted of a comparative analysis of the titles, considering the following aspects: number of elements; structure; communicative strategies; length; the reference to pedagogical and/or research dimensions; other indicators provided by Corpus Linguistics, such as word frequency, and keywords. According to the results, there are differences between the HE institutions regarding some aspects of the titles: number of elements, syntactic-semantic structures, strategies, keywords and the salience of pedagogical and research dimensions. The predominance of certain choices, according to the HE institution, may suggest that each institution constitutes itself as a local academic writing community with its identity characteristics. The differences point to their functioning as scientific communities, discursive communities and also academic writing communities. Concerning this last dimension, by being aware of these characteristics, each community may enhance the functions assigned to the titles.
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