Abstracts Health Sciences

How medical students express their attitudes towards their reflective experience in teaching hospitals: A corpus-based approach to the analysis of evaluation in reflective reports

by Nourah Alajaji

Reflective practice is deemed as one of the essential learning tools in professional education, particularly in the field of Medicine. Educators have recognised the role of reflective writing in focusing students’ reflective learning (Moon, 2004). Research in this writing genre has highlighted the centrality of successful management of affective meanings to achieve critical reflection (Boud et al., 1985). However, the volume of studies that explored the structure and linguistic features of authorial attitudes is limited, indicating a lack of knowledge. This study investigates the macrostructure of reflective writing and the strategies used by writers to position their stance towards entities and propositions across the sections of the reports. To achieve this aim, a corpus of 47 reflective reports written by four-year medical students at the Birmingham Medical School was compiled and interviews with supervisors were conducted. Drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005) and the parameter-based approach (Bednarek, 2006), a framework of evaluation was developed, featuring the analysis of the targets of the evaluation. The findings demonstrated the role of the situational context in selecting those targets, and the way writers position their stance towards them reflects their awareness of the genre conventions and their professional identity. They also revealed the influence the discourse community in structuring the reports. This thesis concludes with an evaluation of the framework and suggestions for pedagogical implications.