Abstract Emphasizing the importance of reader-centeredness in academic writing, we examined the linguistic markers of proximity and positioning in a corpus of technical reports written by the first-year undergraduate engineering students in a technological university. We developed a marker-based model proximity and positioning by adopting Hyland’s five facets namely organization, argument structure, credibility, stance, and engagement and applied it to a corpus of 120 technical reports written by the first year engineering students in an English medium STEM university.The findings revealed that students relied heavily on boosters over hedges, showed a preference for integral citations, and often blurred the boundary between facts and findings. While these discursive strategies show confidence and immediacy, they also narrowed rhetorical flexibility and risked misalignment with professional reporting. The analysis further highlights how group-authored reports generate uneven stance-taking and fragmented authorial voices, pointing to challenges of collaboration in academic writing.By situating technical reports as an occluded pedagogical genre at the interface of academic and professional discourse, the study contributes to corpus pragmatic accounts of learner writing. The results highlight the need for explicit instruction on hedging, citation conventions, and fact–finding differentiation in technical writing pedagogy, particularly in ESL STEM contexts.
Chintalapalli et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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