9: 4-2 (2017) 39–47 | www.sainshumanika.utm.my | e-ISSN ISSN: 2289-6996 Full paper Sains Humanika Developing A Framework For Writing Skill: A Corpus-Based Analysis Of The Written Argumentative Essays Anita Kanestion a ,Manvender Kaur Sarjit Singh a* , Sarimah Shamsudin b a Awang Had Salleh Graduate school, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia b Language Academy, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia *Corresponding author: manvender@uum.edu.my Abstract Most scholars have studied written discourse both in academic and professional setting within the scope of genre-based analysis, which demonstrate an increase interest in analysing the rhetorical structure of written texts. Conversely, there is a dearth of research in Malaysia that explains the rhetorical structure of argumentative essays from a genre analysis perspective. This paper introduces a genre-based corpus analysis using a compiled representative corpus of the argumentative essay for developing a rhetorical structure, also known as , an analytical framework to enhance the students’ writing skills. The compiled representative corpus was consisted of 24 argumentative essays. As a qualitative study, a corpus–based analysis is employed to explore the distinguished move patterns used in the argumentative essays. Using Hyland’s (1990) 11 move pattern as an analytical framework of the argumentative essay, this study revealed a list of moves and steps which were signaled by the linguistic features. Consequently, there were altogether 9 moves and 14 steps were identified in the three stages, namely Introduction, Argument and Conclusion. However, the moves used by the pre-university students in the study did vary from the model as new moves were marked in each stage. Pedagogically, the findings of this study were expected to guide in developing a framework for writing skills. Keywords: Argumentative essays; corpus-based analysis; Hyland’s analytical model © 2017 Penerbit UTM Press. All rights reserved 1.0 INTRODUCTION Academic texts of multiple disciplines are analysed using different types of text analysis approaches as they assist to uncover the written conventions. However, most of the approaches are mainly concerned to study the language use at the lowest unit, which involves the use of part-of-speech. For instance, register analysis is an approach used to study the language at word level and sentence level. To date, most of the researchers employ genre analysis as an instrument to analyse and teach the language required in both academic and professional settings. Swales (1990) has defined genre analysis as a method of studying the written and spoken discourse in order to rationalize the reasons why genre texts have acquired certain features. In other words, it examines the writer’s communicative purpose. Bhatia (1993)further explains that genre analysis is an analytical framework which exposes the correlations of form and function meanwhile Promwani(2010) argues that it also adds to the understanding of the cognitive structuring of knowledge in particular areas of language use. In short, genre analysis is a sophisticated way of analysing the written and spoken discourse at the textual level and linguistic level. Viewing t he fundamental aspect of genre analysis, Swales (1990), who investigated the introduction of research articles, under the domain of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), has highlighted a regular pattern of ‘moves’ and ‘steps’. A move is classified as a unit that functions within a segment of a text and this directly provides an overall purpose of the text(Connor&Mauranen, 1999). However, to realize the functions of the moves involve, writers need to employ a step or a combination of steps (Bhatia, 1993). Therefore, moves and steps are considered as the strategies used by a writer to shape the skeleton of a genre (Mobasher& Mohamad Ali, 2015). To date, the emergence of ‘moves’ and ‘steps’in Swales’ (1990) model of Create A Research Space (CARS), has motivated most researchers to analyse different types of texts within the area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), including academic and professional texts, namely the introduction of research articles (Swales, 1990; Ina, Aizan& Noor Hashimah, 2015); abstracts ( Tseng, 2011; San & Tan, 2012; Chalak&Norouzi, 2013; Abarghooeinezhad&Simrin, 2015); book preface (Abdollahzadeh&Salarvand, 2013; Ali, Muhammad &Asim, 2015); book reviews (Nodoushan&Montazeran, 2012), proposals and theses (Jalilifar, Firuzmand&Roshani, 2011; Choe& Hwang, 2014), problem statement (Vahid, Zahra, Sara &NurIzyanSyamimi, 2016), research articles (Maswana, Kanamaru&Tajino, 2015; Kanoksilaphatam, 2003), and work procedures of engineers (Manvender, 2014). Researchers in these studies have focused on rhetorical structure. Nevertheless, having reviewed aforementioned studies on the academic texts, one will find out that there is a scarcity of research in the rhetorical structure of argumentative essays. Not forgetting, in the same era as Swales (1990), Hyland (1990), proposed an analytical framework of an argumentative essay using 65 essays of non-native speakers, having three stages and several moves,except for steps.This preliminary study wasconducted byadopting‘categories analysis’ and the Birmingham model of spoken discourse (Hyland, 1990), which similarly ledto the realization of moves. These moves are considered to be identified using a bottom-up approach (Vahid, Zahra, Sara &NurIzyanSyamimi, 2016; San & Tan, 2012; Swales, 1990), where the linguistic features, the smallest unit, in each sentence used to determine the moves in the 65 argumentative