The Discourse-Based Interview: A Study of One Student's Awareness of Stance in Academic Writing in Philosophy, Using Corpus Results as a Guide

Abstract

Discourse-based interviews, or DBIs, have been used extensively in the field of writing study to examine writers' implicit knowledge of various genres. This includes the rhetorical intentions behind wordings at the sentence level. In the interim, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to identify patterns in these wordings that reflect the values of the community. This study presents a novel combination of these two methodologies. The post provides a case study of Richard, an accomplished student writer who majored in philosophy at a university in the United States, to demonstrate how meticulous analysis of Richard's work helped to create and improve DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. To be more precise, corpus-based text analysis of Richard's course essays showed that he frequently stated an epistemic perspective in ways that are common and regarded favorably in philosophical debate. However, despite these posture patterns frequently appearing in Richard and Maria's writing, the DBIs showed that neither of them was aware. Overall, these results indicate that it would be advantageous to apply corpus techniques before the DBI to identify major language possibilities that would most likely be missed otherwise. The results also raise important questions about the information sources that assist the growth of disciplinary competence and the method of gaining disciplinary experience.