Discipline-specific use of language patterns in engineering: A comparison of published pedagogical materials

Abstract

In an effort to provide college students with exposure to authentic language patterns specific to their area of study, empirical research on discipline-specific discourse has targeted a plethora of features, including vocabulary, academic literacy conventions, and structural features of academic genres in a number of disciplines (e.g., Hyland, 2008; Kanoksilapatham, 2015; Ward, 2007; Wood & Appel, 2014). To contribute to the line of research that investigates discourse practices in engineering, the present study examined a unique type of language construction – a phrase-frame – a recurrent multiword construction with a variable slot, by addressing the following research question: What are the structural and functional characteristics of phrase-frames identified in published pedagogical materials used in undergraduate lower-division engineering courses? The results indicated that there was considerable overlap among the corpora of teaching materials from five engineering disciplines in terms of the position of the variable slot in a phrase-frame, the general structural characteristics of the phrase-frames, as well as the primary discourse functions performed by these constructions. At the same time, the phrase-frames employed across the five corpora varied in terms of slot productivity, with the majority of frames showing high levels of variability.