On Political Science Students’ Academic Prose: Reporting Verbs in the Undergraduate Thesis Literature Review

Abstract

                Following Swales and Feak (2004) reporting verbs typology, this paper examines the reporting verbs employed by the political science students in their undergraduate theses’ review of related literatures. The present study uses a qualitative descriptive research design. The corpus comprises the first five pages of the review of related literature in the randomly selected 15 undergraduate theses- with a total of 75 pages dated March 2015. The data revealed 52 reporting verbs: 27 (objective) and 25 (evaluative). The findings show reporting verbs are feature of academic papers which is relatively important in establishing a connection to the previous investigations conducted in the field in establishing a niche where a present study takes off.  The paper recommends that teachers of academic writing should be encouraged to use corpus-based data in teaching reporting verbs instead of a mere list of them. Likewise, a training among teachers may be necessary to better assist students in the effective use of reporting verbs in academic writing.