Development of component analysis to support a research-based curriculum for writing engineering research articles

Abstract

Genre analysis has provided many insights into the structure of research articles, but engineering articles have often been grouped with the hard sciences, obscuring their distinctive features. This study reports the development of a research-based curriculum for engineering writing in an English as a lingua franca context, including a published textbook and ancillary materials, during eight years of action research. A new textual analysis method incorporating ideas from genre analysis and argumentation theory, component analysis, was developed to allow students to describe the structure of research articles. The instructor and students, with background support from their advisors, used this to co-construct an understanding of the prototypical structures of engineering articles. Student input helped clarify the analysis categories, textbook descriptions, and assessments. Component analysis may be useful to writing instructors as a basis for quickly understanding how research articles differ, reducing the time necessary to develop research-based curricula for other fields or genres.