Using corpus-based research and online academic corpora to inform writing of the discussion section of a thesis

Abstract This paper shows how corpus-based research on academic writing has been used to inform a variety of concordancing activities designed to help postgraduate science and engineering students write the Discussion section of their theses. The concordancing tasks were integrated into a two-part workshop and made use of a freely-available corpus of research articles. In Part 1 of the workshop students first analyzed printed extracts of discussion sections from theses and identified prototypical move structure patterning. These top-down, genre-based pen-and-paper activities were followed by more bottom-up corpus tasks designed to familiarize students with search strategies for identifying useful lexico-grammatical patterns for particular rhetorical functions. In Part 2 of the workshop students were introduced to variation of move structure patterning in the Discussion section. Concordancing tasks focused on problematic areas identified in students' drafts of the discussion sections of their own theses. The corpus enquiries were also designed to familiarize students with more sophisticated searches to exploit the functionality of the software used. In the last section of the article, I suggest a range of freely-available corpora and tools that are suitable for use in second-language academic writing programs for advanced-level students.

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