In the total corpus of Ras, the authors did not refer to content in section titles. The titles rather functioned as a summary of the topic of the subsequent paragraph(s). In contrast to this, MA thesis writers often referred to the title as if it were part of the text (in the whole corpus: 23 instances: 13 in low rated 10 in high rated theses), generally, using the demonstrative this, twice with the plural these. Below, there are 2 examples for this from LTH3. The writer uses this in s. 50 and these in s. 52 to refer to the section titles preceding them (in addition, the inconsistent section numbers are also disturbing).

 

Another example comes from HTH6: strangely enough, s. 653 (a full research question) is one of the subsection titles of the Conclusion section; the demonstrative this in s. 654 refers to the title, which is the first research question in the thesis.

s. 653 4.1. Research Question 1: How and to what extent do EFL teachers in grammar schools teach the components of communicative competence?

s. 654 This question can be best answered if we draw the conclusions based on the first category of the discussion in 3.2., that is, teachers’ preference towards CLT or the Traditional Approach.

(HTH6)