Argumentation patterns in power engineering student research writing: how learners construct causality, evidence, and generalizations

Abstract

This article investigates the argumentation patterns produced by undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in power engineering programmes at a Ukrainian technical university, with particular attention to three rhetorical operations that lie at the core of disciplinary research writing: the construction of causal relationships, the integration of empirical evidence, and the formulation of disciplinary generalisations. The study is grounded in a corpus of 73 student research texts collected over six months students of the Faculty of Power Engineering and Electromechanics, comprising a total of 1,247 coded argumentative moves analysed through a discourse-analytical framework informed by Toulmin`s model of argumentation, genre theory, and systemic functional linguistics. The findings reveal that 26.4% of all identified argumentative moves constitute clear rhetorical failures, with generalisation recording the highest failure rate at 35.8%, followed by causal construction at 27.6% and evidence integration at 17.9 %. Crucially, the largest single group of moves across all categories – 42.1% – falls into a partial conformity band, indicating that students have acquired the surface conventions of disciplinary argumentation without developing the deeper rhetorical and epistemological understanding required to execute those conventions credibly. A comparative connector analysis further demonstrates that students systematically overuse assertive warrant phrases whilst severely underusing hedged epistemic language, a pattern consistent with epistemological overconfidence rather than lexical deficiency. The article situates these findings within the broader context of Ukrainian higher technical education under conditions of armed conflict, arguing that the documented competency gaps carry not only academic but urgent professional and national consequences, given the imperative for Ukrainian engineers to produce internationally legible technical documentation for reconstruction, donor reporting, and European energy integration. The study concludes with theoretically grounded pedagogical recommendations and six directions for further research, including longitudinal intervention studies, multi-institutional corpus development, and the critical examination of AI-assisted writing tools in wartime educational settings.