An updated account of master’s level business school writing: Revisiting the genre family framework

Abstract

Existing studies of student written genres across business school disciplines were undertaken more than a decade ago. This study has produced an updated overview of master’s level written coursework assignments from core modules across eleven business school degree programmes. Nesi and Gardner’s (2012) genre family framework was applied in analysing task briefs and related documentation to identify social purposes and genres. Results suggest that in the decade since the British academic written English (BAWE) corpus texts were collected, there has been a considerable increase in the proportion of genres with the ‘preparing for professional practice’ social purpose (Nesi & Garner, 2012, p. 36), alongside a considerable drop in proportions of ‘demonstrating powers of informed and independent reasoning’ (Nesi & Garner, 2012, p. 36) genres, which had previously dominated. We argue for the usefulness of further applications of the approach taken in this study across different disciplines and institutional contexts to regularly update knowledge and inform EAP practice. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Keywords

• genre analysis
• disciplinary student genres
• academic business writing