Encapsulation in Student Writings: A Cross-Disciplinary Study

The unity of texts and readers’ textual interpretation is achieved through cohesive relations across sentence boundaries. Cohesive relations establish links that aid in providing access to linguistic elements and activate information in the readers’ memory. Encapsulation is a cohesive relation, which is very helpful in the text’s development as it condenses and synthesizes textual segments such as sentences, sequences of sentences, and paragraphs. Thus, this study intends to investigate the frequency of encapsulator THIS and syntactic and textual structures of encapsulated segments through THIS. This study also reports on the verbs used with encapsulator THIS. Hence, two corpora of papers from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Paper written by Nursing and Biology students were selected. It encapsulates a variety of textual structures, including sentences, sentence chains, and paragraphs. The results also showed that encapsulated structures used verb forms with different functional processes. In addition, the results highlighted some disciplinary differences concerning encapsulation (frequencies and encapsulated structures) and verbs’ functional processes used in encapsulation. The results of this study are directly applicable in the syllabus designed for writing academic genres.