Genres and registers of student report writing: An SFL perspective on texts and practices

Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic Written English) corpus draws on an exploration of the social context of assessed student writing in order to support the analysis of texts with an IMRD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) type structure as members of either the Research Report or Methodology Recount genre family. It also illustrates how register analysis in SFL allows the analyst to gain insights into disciplinary contexts and ideologies through a comparison of extracts from the methods sections of corpus linguistics, psychology and chemistry assignment texts. The paper not only shows how research into writing practices and participant perspectives is combined with text analysis in one project, but also argues that an understanding of both is essential for the application of research findings in teaching EAP.

► Value of investigating social context to classify student reports as Research Report or Methodology Recount genre families.
► Illustrates insights gained from systemic functional linguistic analysis of registers of reported methodology extracts.
► Draws on British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of proficient university student assignments across disciplines.
► Argues for value of research into both texts and practices for applications to EAP.