Research grant proposals are a very important genre in many academic disciplines,
and a window into which we are able to observe academic engagements and
interactions. However, there has been little textual analysis of the genre and research
on how successful scholars approach the writing task. Drawing on the social
constructionist genre scholarship, this study collected and analyzed nine successful
SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) research grant
proposals from nine professors in the field of education at a Canadian university. The
proposals were examined in terms of three important textual features: generic structure,
referential behavior, hedges and boosters. Semi-structured discourse-based interviews
with the nine professors as insider informants were also conducted. The main findings
of the study include the following: (1) A three-move scheme was developed in this
study as reflecting the generic structure of research grant proposal summaries. In
analyzing the main text of research grant proposals, I first recognized the ICMC
pattern (Introduction-Context-Methodology-Communication of Results) as the overall
structure; ten moves as the constitutive functional components were then identified
under this pattern. (2) Non-integral (where the name of the cited author does not
appear in the actual citing sentence), non-reporting (where no reporting verb such as
show, establish, suggest is employed to introduce the cited work), and generalization
(where the proposition is attributed to two or more sources) forms of citations were
found to be predominantly used in the research grant proposals. Self-citation was also
used with a high frequency in this genre. 3) The use of boosters was found to exceed
the use of hedges, and the distribution of hedges and boosters were found uneven
across the rhetorical sections. Interviews with the nine professors further reveal how
communicative purposes, institutional practice, and reader-writer relationship
co-constructed the format as well as the stylistic features of grant writing. The study
provides genre analysts as well as novice grant writers some useful insights into the
research grant proposal writing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/12452 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Feng, Haiying |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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