The genre "report" and its representations in the discourse of members of the academia

Abstract

In this article we deal with written interactions at university level. In particular, we inform about the results of a study conducted on teachers' perceptions about the rhetorical and functional features of the genre report. The research takes into account psycho-socio-pragmatic aspects, utilizes discourse analysis as a tool and applies a qualitative methodology to highlight and reconstruct genre representations. The material collected for study and analysis consists of 162 questionnaires applied to second-year teachers working in three universities of the capital city. Results show that informants share a social representation of the genre and of its textual structure. It is concluded that teachers consider conceptual and linguistically appropriate reports, as well as communicatively adequate texts, those that make the links between mental and social representation, textual structuring and description of reality explicit, in accordance with the special nature of the task requested.