Dissertation titles in EFL and UK-based contexts: How much do they differ?

Abstract

Formulating a dissertation title effectively is both a critical and an important issue for many students, particularly non-native speakers of English. This difficulty arises from the fact that titles are constrained by both disciplinary and generic conventions. However, despite the growing body of literature on genre-based studies, these rhetorical sections have not yet received due attention. The global aim of this paper is to compare between Master's dissertation titles written by students in an English-speaking context, the United Kingdom and a context where English is a foreign language, Algeria. In particular, this study seeks to examine the distinctive features that titles display and find out how much they differ. Four features were investigated in 176 titles: title length, title type, title structure, and title combinations. The findings suggest that, except for their internal syntactic structure, which showed no variability, titles differ in various aspects, indicating that contexts where dissertations are written might be an influential source on title design. Implications from this study will help to enlarge research in the area and develop students' awareness about title design in academic writing.