How do first-year Psychology students write reports?

Abstract

This study analyzed the characteristics of the written reports produced by first-year incoming students in the Psychology degree program at a National University in Argentina. A corpus of 65 reports. In these reports, students -organized in groups- administered a questionnaire on anxieties and fears to pregnant women and wrote a report following a specific set of instructions provided by the course staff. The analysis adopted a mixed descriptive perspective (quantitative and qualitative) and employed the categories proposed by Author 3 and other (2019): pragmatic level (coherence with the production context), global level (presence and integration of canonical parts), and local level (grammatical structure, lexical repetitions, punctuation, discourse reformulators, and aspects of academic register, such as citation conventions, disciplinary terminology, enunciative positioning, and spelling). The results revealed that, at the pragmatic level, the majority of the texts (95.39%) adequately matched the instructions and the disciplinary context. At the global level, the predominant feature was the omission of canonical parts (55.38%), although the included parts showed coherent integration in most cases (64.62%). At the local level, greater difficulties were identified in grammatical structure, lexical repetitions, and the use of punctuation, while the use of reformulators, disciplinary terminology, enunciative positioning, and spelling showed more favorable performance. These findings demonstrated that, despite being novice writers within the disciplinary community, the students achieved an adequate understanding of the report genre in its pragmatic dimension and a partial understanding of its global and local conventions.