The student laboratory report genre: A genre analysis

Abstract

This article provides a move analysis of the student laboratory report, a genre which is central to science and engineering study, and to which students may have had little prior exposure. Using a data set of 60 highly-graded laboratory reports from the BAWE corpus (British Academic Writing in English, Gardner & Nesi, 2013), moves are described, together with typical linguistic features. Laboratory report moves are compared with moves previously identified in empirical research articles (RAs), a genre which has the same macrostructure and also presents experimental findings. The different writer-reader relationships and different purposes in these genres (pedagogical in the laboratory report, and presenting new research in RAs) result in some significant differences in the realization of moves. The findings are potentially useful to teachers of science writing.