Teaching master thesis writing to engineers: Insights from corpus and genre analysis of introductions

Abstract

Abstract A large proportion of all graduates study engineering disciplines, and the number of master theses completed far outstrips that of doctoral-level works. However, engineering disciplines in general and their master theses in particular have received comparatively little attention from applied linguistics, leaving writing instructors with sparse guidance when preparing courses for MSc students in engineering. Here, we present the results of a corpus analysis of introduction sections in 57 master theses in mechanical engineering and a genre analysis of 16 of their introductions. A concordance analysis of the most frequent keywords revealed the typical discourse functions employed by students when writing about their research in this section. The genre analysis confirmed the presence of most of the elements of Swales s CARS schema in MSc theses. These findings contribute to knowledge of this understudied field in applied linguistics and can be used to design materials and courses for MSc engineering students focussing on vocabulary, rhetorical structures, and academic socialisation.