The use of code glosses in MA dissertations in English and in Italian: A pilot study in an EMI context

Abstract

Within the English Medium of Instruction (EMI) framework adopted by many European universities, students listen to lectures, present, write, and take exams in English. Research on EMI settings mostly focused on lectures, leaving scant attention to student writing and in particular to the writing of dissertations in the Italian context. This paper addresses this gap by investigating lexico-grammatical occurrences of selected metadiscursive features adopted in the final dissertations of Italian masters’ students in business and economics courses. The dissertations are retrieved from the MoReThesisCorpus, a large digital repository of theses and dissertations at the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia. By paying close attention to reformulations and exemplifications, our findings reveal a developmental interconnection between spoken and written metadiscursive features. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .