Knowledge and Rhetoric in the Written Discourse of Engineering Internship

Abstract

Internship or practical training at the workplace is an important and often mandatory component in the engineering undergraduate education. While abundant research has been conducted on common genres by engineering students such as laboratory reports and final-year research dissertations, the internship report as subsumed under the ‘apprenticeship’ genre family (Spafford et al., 2006), appears under-examined. Drawing on the textual framework of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) and APPRAISAL (Martin & White, 2005), this qualitative case study investigates the role of text in reifying the knowledge and arguments specific to the internship report genre. To highlight the unique nature of this genre, a summer internship report by a civil engineering undergraduate recounting his practical experience at an international engineering consulting company was contrasted with his laboratory report written previously. In addition to student writing, assignment prompts by the school department and discourse-based interviews were also examined. Findings show that unique textual resources and rhetorical strategies were employed in the internship report to reveal a distinctive assemblage of engineering design knowledge, abductive reasoning and a balance of stakeholders’ interests which are crucial in an engineering student’ enculturation into the technical profession and community of practice.