Hacia un modelo retórico-discursivo del macrogénero Trabajo Final de Grado en Licenciatura

From an academic point of view, the most important landmark that students face when transitioning from higher education to professional life, is undoubtedly the production and defense of a senior thesis or Graduation Project. This enables them to gradually become members of the discourse community of the chosen discipline. This study sought to put forward a theory-and-empirically based rhetorical-discursive model of the Undergraduate Macro-Genre Graduation Project (UMGGP) grounded in five disciplines. Our model combines genre theory with a focus on communication and corpus linguistics. A subcorpus of 407 undergraduate graduation projects (UGP) was gathered from 4 different disciplines: Literature, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. The rhetorical-discourse organization of BGP was configured through its macro purposes and communicative purposes. As a result, we proposed a rhetoric-discursive organization model that comprises 5 macromoves, 18 moves, and 65 steps. This model was tested through the analysis of a subcorpus of 59 UGP from Civil Engineering Informatics. The findings suggest that our model articulates macropurposes and communicative purposes of UMGGP and enables researchers to identify discursive patterns of graduation projects from the disciplines in study. This model may contribute to the academic literacy domain and to the development of didactic applications for the academic writing purposes.