6th International Conference on Humanistic Studies 2023

In academic contexts, writing has remained a great challenge for students, particularly the writing of term papers. Precisely, students of the English Language with a Second Foreign Language Degree Course at Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas show inconsistencies in the design and organization of their term papers in the subject Investigación, mainly in the organization and exposition of ideas in the Introduction. The purpose of this study is to design a model describing the rhetorical moves and most recurrent phrases characterizing the Introduction of term papers. The methodology implemented held to a mixed-method approach, combining both quantitative and qualitative data. The sample included ten students of the academic year 2022 and a corpus of fourteen term papers presented by fourth-year students between the years 2019 and 2022. The results of the diagnostic phase corroborated the necessity of creating a tool to enhance students’ writing skills for writing the Introduction of their term papers. The design of a model describing the rhetorical structure and most recurrent phrases characterizing the Introduction of term papers comprised four stages: (1) corpus compilation, (2) corpus tagging, (3) corpus processing, and (4) move analysis of the Introduction of term papers. The model designed could be a step forward to help students better organize their ideas in the Introduction of term papers. Moreover, it can help improve the quality of the teaching and learning process of academic writing.