This thesis examines the way in which purpose and identity are realised in the written case
reports of radiography students in comparison with those of professional writers. Students
entering a new discourse community have to take on a new social identity and this identity
is expressed by means of familiarity with the appropriate discourse conventions, including
genre as the most overt expression of rhetorical purpose. Also important are the
pragmatic choices used by writers to guide readers’ understanding of text and to construct
interaction between them, i.e. metadiscourse, which here provides an additional and
complementary way of viewing purpose and identity.
The study aims, at a more theoretical level, to make a contribution to writing research by
integrating genre analysis and metadiscourse analysis within a single framework to
provide new insight into the resources available to writers to construe identity in text. At a
descriptive level, it provides analyses of a hitherto neglected genre of medical writing.
Because the study compares the writing of novices and professionals, the description of
this genre makes findings available for pedagogical application.
Radiographers and radiologists work as members of the same professional teams and
both publish case reports, often in the same journals. Data for the study is provided by
two corpora of reports, one produced by radiography students and the other published in
national journals by professionals. The genre analysis establishes the move structure of
the radiological case study for both corpora and a cross-corpus analysis of metadiscourse
demonstrates how identity is realised in the text as the moves unfold. Both quantitative
and qualitative approaches are adopted with regard to the data.
The student reports appear to be examples of a sub-genre of case reports with the move
structure and metadiscoursal strategies differing in several significant ways, reflecting the
different purposes and identities of the writers. Student writers are found not to be
concerned with the more persuasive rhetorical functions of the genre and tend to align
themselves with the viewpoint of the patient rather than the medical profession, drawing on
school essay discourse and making use of metadiscoursal strategies associated with
textbooks. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/2639 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Goodier, Caroline Margaret Mary |
| Contributors | Hubbard, E. H. (Ernest Hilton), 1947- |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource ([viii], 354 leaves) |
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