Approaching ‘academic essay’ as an ‘apprenticeship’ genre in Social Sciences: the case of Sociology

ABSTRACT Academic essay is a key genre that students in the Social Sciences and Humanities are required to write in tertiary education. Research on this object in Spanish has been scarce, focusing generally on the rhetorical structure of this genre, without considering possible disciplinary variation in the way essays are written. This paper explores the academic essay genre within Social Sciences, through the analysis of texts written by Sociology tertiary students. The typological description is founded on Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and its genre analysis (Martin & Rose 2008; Hood 2010).