Graduate students’ genre knowledge and perceived disciplinary practices: Creating a research space across disciplines

Journal article, 2016

Disciplinary differences in academic writing have been addressed in applied linguistics from multiple perspectives. This article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used by multilingual graduate students from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to create a research space in academic introductions. Adopting an in-depth qualitative approach, we draw on three data sources: graduate learners’ analyses of model texts, their reflections on their own writing strategies, and a textual analysis of their introductions, to better understand how genre knowledge is connected to perceived disciplinary practices. Our findings indicate that the students’ formal and rhetorical knowledge of genre is linked to their perception of knowledge-making practices in their respective disciplines. We discuss pedagogical implications for EAP professionals working with students from different disciplines in multilingual contexts.