Engagement in Pakistani Academic Research Discourse: A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of PhD Theses in Natural and Social Sciences

This study investigates the rhetorical choices of the engagement features in Pakistani Academic Research Discourse (PARD) of natural and social sciences. Using the 'Interaction Model' (Hyland, 2005), it explores how the writers of different disciplinary cultures employ engagement features to define and maintain their knowledge territories in their respective fields. Hyland's (2005) typology of engagement features includes; "reader pronouns," "directives," "questions," "shared knowledge" and "personal asides" as linguistic elements of engagement. The corpus data for this study comprised 120 PhD theses produced by Pakistani scholars in the domains of natural and social sciences. This data was accessed from Pakistan Research Repository (www.prr.hec.gov.pk ); and after cleaning, it was transferred into the text-file format. Corpus analysis tool AntConc 3.4.4w was used for generating Word-lists, Keywords, and Concordances to explore engagement features from PARD. The findings reveal that, in PhD theses of the social sciences, authors make more use of "reader's pronouns," "directives," "questions," and "appeal to shared knowledge" than in the natural sciences. The study concludes by emphasizing the need for more research to understand how, discursively, knowledge communities of natural and social sciences are established. The findings of the study may be used to develop English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses and resources aimed at improving the academic writing skills of new researchers.