René Venegas - CeRLA Seminar - «Disciplinary discourse and epistemic writing in higher education: From linguistic description to didactic mediation in engineering»

This presentation introduces a corpus-based, rhetorical-discursive approach to analyzing and teaching disciplinary writing in engineering. Because students often struggle to move from academic training genres to professional and research genres, the project models engineering discourse using large annotated corpora of technical and final project reports. This analysis identifies key rhetorical moves and linguistic patterns that shape knowledge construction in the field.

These findings support the development of PEUMO, an online writing platform that combines corpus queries, genre-based feedback, and automated rhetorical analysis using NLP and the BETO transformer to offer explainable guidance to novice writers. A quasi-experimental study with final-year computing engineering students shows significant gains in writing quality, metacognitive awareness, and genre mastery. Overall, the project demonstrates how linguistically informed, corpus-driven computational feedback can strengthen disciplinary literacy and support students’ transition to professional engineering communication.