Chapter 9. The Textbook genre and its rhetorical organisation in four scientific disciplines

It is hard to find research in which the rhetorical organisation of a discourse genre and the respective frequency of occurrence of moves and steps are worked together across disciplines. This chapter aims to become a step in helping to fill this gap in research on Spanish. The Textbook genre, the occurrence of its rhetorical macro-moves, moves and steps and disciplinarity become the focus of this study. This chapter is offered as a continuation and complementation of the previous one. More specifically, in this chapter we concentrate on the frequency with which each of the macro-moves, moves and steps are executed throughout 126 textbooks. We distinguish the area of knowledge (Basic Sciences and Engineering and Social Sciences and Humanities) as well as the specific discipline (Social Work, Psychology, Industrial Chemistry and Construction Engineering). The main findings show there are interesting differences between the occurrence of some moves and steps across the disciplines under study.