Rhetorical Structure of an Occluded Academic Genre: A Corpus-Based Move Analysis of Teaching Philosophy Statements
Abstract
Teaching philosophy statements (TPSs) are high-stakes promotional documents required for academic hiring, tenure, and promotion in higher education worldwide. Despite their gatekeeping function in professional academic discourse, TPSs remain an underexamined occluded genre: prescriptive writing guides offer general advice, but few empirical studies have described the rhetorical structure of authentic statements. This study addresses this gap by investigating the move-step structure and lexicogrammatical features of TPSs from an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective. A specialized corpus of 46 authentic TPSs written by faculty members and graduate students from North American universities (2004-2016) was compiled and analysed using corpus-based genre analysis. Functional moves were coded in MAXQDA with an inter-rater reliability of 94.9%, and keywords and three-word n-grams for each conventional move were extracted with AntConc. The analysis identified fourteen moves across three categories (teacher-focused, classroom-focused, and teaching/evaluation process), of which five were conventional. The most frequent and cyclical move was focus on teaching practices (100%), indicating that concrete classroom examples outweigh abstract philosophical declarations. The genre proved hybrid and flexible, with no fixed move order, combining features of academic prose (prepositional-phrase n-grams) and promotional genres such as CVs and application letters. Substantial variation emerged between faculty and graduate-statement corpora: faculty privileged philosophical concepts and mentorship, while graduate students foregrounded concrete activities, technology use, and diversity. A systematic comparison with twelve prescriptive writing guides revealed partial alignment but also several moves – such as acknowledging mentors and addressing students’ difficulties – that occur in authentic texts but are absent from the guides. The study contributes a genre model grounded in authentic data, offers empirically derived lexicogrammatical resources for novice writers, and provides pedagogical implications for teacher training and ESP instruction in academic genres.