So how do i describe it? - a discursive rhetorical model of the project report genre in spanish: an approach to academic writing in civil engineering

ABSTRACT

The project report is a genre widely used in the processes of academic training in computer science civil engineering. Students write this genre in the university classroom guided by diverse academic and professional purposes. Despite its relevance, empirical rhetorical-discursive descriptions that highlight the value of student writing are still scarce in Spanish. In this way, we describe the rhetorical-discursive organization of the project report genre in this subdiscipline to gain more knowledge about the written production at the rhetorical level. For this purpose, we follow a methodological design anchored in Genre Analysis of Swalesian roots, and we analyze a corpus formed by 58 texts. The use of this method helped us to determine macromoves, moves and steps of the genre, communicative functions and text characteristics. The resulting rhetorical model shows 16 moves and 36 steps. This model proved high stability of this genre, its mesogeneric nature and interconnection role between the academic and the professional discourse. Finally, implications for genre theory, for description of the Spanish language and for genre pedagogy emerge from the results.

Keywords:
Student genre; project report; rhetoric-discursive model; computer science civil engineering; academic writing