Debunking method section of tertiary electrical engineering laboratory reports

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-196-8_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Method section; laboratory reports; move analysis; engineering discourse

Abstract

This research investigates how electrical engineering undergraduates in a tertiary institution write the method section of laboratory reports (ELR) for academic purposes. It aims to identify specific rhetorical moves, recurrent step patterns and combination of both used in composing the report’s method section. In order to identify the writing patterns and conventions among the final-year electrical engineering undergraduates, a genre analysis was conducted using a corpus of 35 student reports. This study adopted Genre Theory as the theoretical framework, Ngowu(1997) analytical framework and the BCU(2007) approach and procedures for analysis. A pilot test was conducted to determine the most suitable model that fits the best to describe move and steps of ELR in the method section. An inter-coder reliability was obtained that showed high significance. To ensure validity, the move and steps were benchmarked at 60% of occurrences for analysis. This study describes the main move in method as Move 1 as this section starts subsequently after the introduction section. The analysis of the method section of 35 ELR’s indicates that this section consists of a main move describing experimental procedures (obligatory). Following Move 1 are three steps, firstly M1S1, setting up experiment (conventional), secondly, M1S2 stating precautions (optional) and finally M1S3 conducting the experiment (obligatory). The exemplification of findings was cross checked against the university guidelines to identify the lacks and the combination of move patterns show the steps are in sequence of M1S1M1S2M1S3. The apparatus and procedures are consistently integrated and conventionally used except for stating precautions were used optionally. The method employed in this study may be replicated to analyse various sections of scientific and technical reports such as introduction, result, discussion and conclusion (IRDC). The study emphasises collaboration between English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners such as writing instructors and discipline-specific experts in engineering to enhance and improve genre-based writing instruction at tertiary level.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Veeramuthu Veerappan
AU  - Sareen Kaur Bhar
AU  - Thiba Naraina Chetty
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/01/25
TI  - Debunking method section of tertiary electrical engineering laboratory reports
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Communication, Language, Education and Social Sciences (CLESS 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 145
EP  - 154
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-196-8_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-196-8_14
ID  - Veerappan2024
ER  -