How master students act rhetorically when they need to justify their research

ABSTRACT We target here to analyze the rhetorical organization of the justificative section of pre-research projects of authorship of graduates of cursos de letras in a situation of submission to master’s degree courses. The analysis displayed the presence of four new rhetorical steps not yet described for the justification section, as well as the recurrence of rhetorical steps typical of the sections of objective, theoretical framework, methodology, discussion and conclusion. An important pedagogical implication of the research is related to the reading functions directed to the research universe. The data suggest the prevalence of reading practices aimed at the understanding of concepts and the explanation of phenomena, and, in contrast, the reading practices focused on the unknown and on the research gaps are scarcer.