Rhetorical Structure of Integrated Results and Discussion Chapter in Master’s Dissertations Across Disciplines

Abstract

Writing a dissertation is the most challenging task for students, especially the Integrated Results and Discussion chapter. One solution would be to offer them a template of the rhetorical flow of this chapter. However, to date, a limited number of studies have been conducted on the rhetorical movement of this chapter. Therefore, the rhetorical units of Integrated Results and Discussion chapters of 40 Master's dissertations in the hard and soft science disciplines obtained from a Malaysian local public university were investigated. The findings indicated that this chapter focused predominantly on presenting the results followed by commenting on them. Disciplinary variation was observed in the use of 'referring to previous research' and 'making overt claims or generalizations' which were observed more in the dissertations in the soft sciences. Besides, 'invalidating results' was found more in the dissertations in the hard sciences. To conclude, knowing the prevalent moves may heighten the awareness of novice postgraduate students to align their writing to the academic writing conventions. Furthermore, awareness on the disciplinary variations of the use of certain rhetorical moves would sensitize novice writers to the preferred disciplinary style of writing Integrated Results and Discussion chapter.

¿Qué caracteriza a una buena sección RESULTADOS? Vinculación entre calidad y rasgos lingüístico-discursivos en Trabajos Finales de Grado de Ingeniería Informática

“…En esta sección, no solo se presentan los resultados por medio de recursos multimodales, sino que también se describen, comentan, analizan e interpretan, realizando afirmaciones tentativas sustentadas en su conocimiento disciplinar (Loan y Pramoolsook, 2015). A partir de lo anterior, se observa que, comúnmente, el propósito comunicativo de la sección discusión se une al de los resultados, por lo que el apartado resultante incluye prototípicamente tres movimientos retóricos, a saber, 'Presentación de información preparatoria de los resultados', 'Presentación de resultados' y 'Comentario de resultados' (Dastjerdi et al, 2017;Lillo-Fuentes et al, 2021).…”

A Comparative Study of Reporting Verbs Used in the Introduction Chapters of Bachelor’s Theses and Master’s Theses by Chinese English-Majored Students

“…The two raters analyzed the 30 BT Introductions and 30 MT Introductions independently and their identification of RVs was compared to determine their inter-rater reliability, noting agreements and disagreements on the presence and absence of each RV. The percentage agreement was calculated using the formula A/(A+D) x 100 (A=the number of agreements, Copyright © 2021, authors, e-ISSN: 2502-6747, p-ISSN: 2301-9468 D=the number of disagreements) (Biber et al, 2007;Dastjerdi et al, 2017). Accordingly, they achieved 91.7% agreement.…”

Voice in rhetorical units of results and discussion chapter of master's theses: across science study

“…The classification of the moves and steps was based on the adapted framework proposed by Kanoksilapatham (2005). For more information on the rhetorical moves and steps of the corpus, see Shirian Dastjerdi et al (2017aDastjerdi et al ( , 2017b. Kanoksilaphatham's (2005) analytical framework was found to be more suitable for this study due to the following reasons: Firstly, in comparison to the other frameworks (Brett 1994;Swales 1990), it is more up-to-date.…”

“…As such, firstly obligatory rhetorical units of the Results and Discussion chapters of the master's theses were investigated. Secondly, the frequency of occurrence and percentage of occurrence of the used voices in the obligatory rhetorical units were identified (see Shirian Dastjerdi et al 2017a and2017b). Thirdly, the textual analysis was conducted in order to find out the possible reasons for the voice preferences and shifts in the rhetorical moves and steps.…”