ABSTRACT
Recent research in student writing has emphasized the degree to which university students have to meet the challenge of writing in conventionalized ways within their disciplinary areas in order to achieve success (Bazerman, 2001; Harwood and Hadley, 2004; Hewings, 1999; Hyland, 2008b; Lillis, 1999, 2001; North, 2005b; Prior, 1998; Rai, 2008). For example, Hewings (1999: 35) asserts that ‘what disciplines write about and how they write about it is central to their construction and maintenance of identity’ and, similarly, Hyland and Tse (2007: 240) argue that ‘all disciplines shape words for their own uses’. In writing as members of an academic community, students are thus learning new discourse practices and adopting new and changing perceptions of themselves as writers. Despite the recognition of its importance, and widespread studies of postgraduate and professional academic writing, disciplinarity within undergraduate student writing has been relatively little explored, though additional studies have been conducted since the compilation of the BAWE corpus (e.g. Bruce, 2010; Gardner, 2008; Thompson, 2009). The literature on NNS undergraduate writing within different disciplines is even narrower, as most studies either consider all texts together, regardless of discipline (e.g. Chen’s study of Chinese assignments in BAWE, 2009) or are conducted on a single discipline (e.g. Lee and Chen’s, 2009, study of writing in Linguistics). In contrast, aspects of postgraduate writing in the UK and professional academic writing have been more widely studied across a range of disciplines and genres, probably as these texts are more readily accessible since they are in the public domain (e.g. Charles, 2003, 2006; Groom, 2005, 2007; Harwood, 2003, 2005; Hyland and Tse, 2005; Oakey, 2002, 2009; Pecorari, 2009; Samraj, 2002, 2005; Thompson, 2001, 2005; Yeung, 2007).
