AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

This study concerns the use of English within the academic genre in respectively undergraduate and master level projects from Roskilde University (RUC). It has been in our interest to seek out and analyze the general trends that make up the divergences using a corpora based, quantitative approach on which we will later base a qualitative analysis. We started out identifying a wide range of discourses that make up the genre in question, but after analyzing the first batch of projects quickly concluded that a more realistic approach would be to limit ourselves to the most prominent discourses, more specifically meta-discourses described in “A Taxonomy of Metadiscourse in Spoken and Written Academic English” by Ädel (2010) and hedging as described in “Hedging in Academic Writing and EAP Textbooks” by Hyland (1994). From the results of our analysis we have been able to both ascertain similarities but also tendencies that separate the two academic levels. While a tool such as hedging surprisingly appeared to serve the same role, and in an equal fashion, on both levels, texts from the master projects distinguished themselves by generally having a more mindful and deliberate approach to meta-discourse usage, with greater confidence in their general discourse than the undergraduate projects. Master projects also proved a different usage of phorics management, which contributed to a higher quality of readability.