Discovering which strategies of engagement and stance are used in the introductions and conclusions of final projects

Abstract

With the final project students are expected to be able to do more than only “saying the knowledge”; that means they must be able to interact with the readers and to adopt a point of view in relation to the content. This research aims to analyse these interactive text dimensions using metadiscourse. The corpus is composed by 116 introductions and conclusions of final projects in Spanish between the years 2017 and 2019, that belong to the areas of Social and Human Sciences, Health Sciences and Education. The results evidence the presence of the readers in the texts, but this interaction requires, on the one hand, greater harmonization of the positions with which the judgments and opinions are presented, and, on the other hand, a dialogic relationship that ensures careful interpersonal negotiation. From this knowledge, specific didactic implications are derived for the improvement of academic communication training of university students.