Extending Our Understanding of Unpublished Academic Writing: The Creation and Analysis of CorGrad

Research on disciplinary variation in graduate student writing (GSW) has typically focused on theses and dissertations. Less attention has been paid to coursework assignments (e.g., essays, recounts, exercises, etc.), which are the pre-cursors to final capstone projects. Coursework papers are prioritized by both students and professors because they are used for both formative and summative assessments and are graduate students' first venture into disciplinary writing. As such, they indoctrinate students into the practices of their fields (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995). This dissertation details the situational and linguistic exploration of the academic writing assignments of master's- and doctoral-level students in two applied sciences disciplines at a major midwestern American university. Following calls for increased attention to corpus design and representativeness (Egbert, 2019; Egbert, Biber, & Gray, 2022), the project first documents the domain analysis and subsequent compilation of the Corpus of Graduate Student Papers (CorGrad). CorGrad represents 12 sub-registers in two disciplines--applied linguistics and engineering, a total of just over 1,000 texts and 2 million words. The study also reports a situational analysis, highlighting key contextual features of the course papers and a linguistic analysis via the results of a multi-dimensional analysis (Biber, 1988). Course papers are then compared across disciplines and sub-registers. The results demonstrate that course papers exhibit distinct patterns of language use, which can often be attributed to the varying purposes and situational features of the texts but are also related to disciplinary ways of knowing. Findings are discussed in terms of their significance to disciplinary writing research and the representativeness of student writing corpora. Beyond enhancing an understanding of academic writing, the results also contribute to an exploration of register as a continuous construct and highlight the importance of domain and situational analyses in the development of corpora. These findings also have the potential to inform pedagogy and curriculum development and provide an enhanced understanding of academic coursework writing for stakeholders such as professors, graduate students, writing consultants. Knowledge of the register-specific patterns of unpublished GSW is necessary because it can help to refine how curricula and programs are designed, how prompts are written, and how graduate students are supported during the pre-thesis/dissertation phase of their matriculation. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]