Abstract
This study investigates the rhetorical choices of the engagement features in Pakistani Academic
Research Discourse (PARD) of natural and social sciences. Using the ‘Interaction Model’ (Hyland,
2005), it explores how the writers of different disciplinary cultures employ engagement features to
define and maintain their knowledge territories in their respective fields. Hyland’s (2005) typology
of engagement features includes; reader pronouns, directives, questions, shared knowledge and
personal asides as linguistic elements of engagement. The corpus data for this study comprised
120 PhD theses produced by Pakistani scholars in the domains of natural and social sciences. This
data was accessed from Pakistan Research Repository (www.prr.hec.gov.pk ); and after cleaning,
it was transferred into the text-file format. Corpus analysis tool AntConc 3.4.4w was used for
generating Word-lists, Keywords, and Concordances to explore engagement features from PARD.
The findings reveal that, in PhD theses of the social sciences, authors make more use of reader’s
pronouns, directives, questions, and appeal to shared knowledge than in the natural sciences. The
study concludes by emphasizing the need for more research to understand how, discursively,
knowledge communities of natural and social sciences are established. The findings of the study
may be used to develop English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses and resources aimed at
improving the academic writing skills of new researchers.
Moazzam Ali Malik, Muhammad Islam, Muhammad Shahbaz. (2020) Engagement in Pakistani Academic Research Discourse: A Cross-disciplinary Analysis of PhD Theses in Natural and Social Sciences, Bulletin of Education & Research, Volume 42, Issue 1.
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