Chapter 5. University academic genres

The issue of disciplinarity is increasingly salient in language studies. Questions as to how undergraduate students construct disciplinary knowledge from the texts included in the university curricula and how the knowledge structure involved in these texts helps to shape educational experiences and outcomes are the focus of studies across a variety of disciplines, using a wide range of approaches. One way to access the specialised written genres employed by academia is to begin from the tenet that all materials read by students during their university training reveal relevant data about disciplinary genres. This chapter presents an in-depth description of the collection and construction of the PUCV-2006 Academic Corpus, which comprises almost 59 million words, in four disciplines: Industrial Chemistry, Construction Engineering, Social Work, and Psychology. In addition, a genre typology emerged from the 491 texts that comprise this corpus.