Discourse features of the student-produced academic research paper: variations across disciplinary courses

The research paper has been identified as a genre that is commonly produced in both graduate and undergraduate courses. However, researchers have noted that this label tends to be used loosely and that texts referred to as research papers are not characterized by a fixed set of discoursal features [such as Johns A.M. (1997). Text, role and context . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]. In addition, there appears to be no linguistic study of how the discourse structure of texts referred to as research papers may vary across courses in undergraduate or graduate programs. Using genre analysis, this study explores the nature of research papers from two disciplinary graduate courses, in order to increase our understanding of this heterogeneous genre and the dimensions along which it can vary across sub-disciplines. Evaluated research papers from two courses in environmental science were analyzed along a number of dimensions: the overall organization of the papers, the claims made, the intertextual links established, and the epistemic or phenomenal focus of the paper. The results of these analyses indicate that research papers can have multiply layered communicative purposes, which may vary in different disciplinary courses, resulting in texts characterized by different discoursal features.