A Genre Analysis of Research Article Discussions in Applied Linguistics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Research Article is one of the most important genres that received extensive attention in genre analysis. Research abstracts have received extreme importance due to the valuable academic information in the world. The present study aims to explore the rhetorical structure of the Iranian and international abstracts published in leading English and Persian journals. The researcher randomly selected 40 research articles from six Iranian journals of applied linguistics and international journals of applied linguistics. The study used two types of instruments. The Ant Mover software is a freeware text structure analysis program (developed by Anthony Laurence, 2003). According to Hyland's model, five moves are involved, including Introduction (M1) purposes (M2) Method (M3) product (M4) and conclusion (M5). The corpus, then, was analyzed based on the Ant Mover software and Hyland's (2000) five move frameworks to identify the rhetorical structure of the selected corpus. As a result, the frequency of each move in each abstract was calculated after the moves were analyzed. A frequency and percentage were counted and a chi-square analysis was run to answer the research hypothesis. The finding also showed that despite the differences in frequency of moves in two corpora, these differences were not statistically significant.
Journal of Language and Education, 2022
Background. Recent years have seen tremendous research efforts in the development of English for academic and research publication purposes, utilising an established approach to comparative genre analysis. This growing interest is primarily driven by the global dominance of Anglophone writing conventions, which necessitates raising awareness among researchers, particularly in non-Anglophone contexts. Purpose. This study explored and analysed the communicative intents of the discussion sections in research articles in two different contexts to investigate the effect of nativeness on the structural organisation in this genre. The focus of the study was on the rhetorical structure and employment of Moves in the applied linguistics research article Discussions, written in English by Iranian and native English-speaking researchers. Methods. A mixed-methods research study was conducted on two corpora, comprising 40 Discussions written by Iranian scholars and 40 Discussions written by native English-speaking scholars, selected from research articles published in international peer-reviewed journals. Results. The comparison of the two corpora revealed similarities and differences in the frequency, type, structure, sequence, and cyclicity of Moves. While there were significant differences in the frequency and sequence of Moves and Steps, both corpora employed the same types. They featured cyclical structures with no evidence of linear patterns across the Discussions. Both groups of researchers found it essential to provide background information and report and comment on the results in the research article Discussions, however, with notable differences in commenting strategies, i.e., Steps. The results indicated that socio-cultural conventions might have influenced the scholars' under-and over-employment of certain Moves and Steps in the research article Discussions. Implications. The findings of this study provide research-based evidence to practically and pedagogically assist in the context of English for academic and specific purposes, particularly in teaching English for research publication purposes to non-native English-speaking scholars.
English Language Teaching, 2012
This study investigates the rhetorical move structure of English applied linguistic research article Discussions published in Thai and international journals. Two corpora comprising of 30 Thai Discussions and 30 international Discussions were analyzed using Yang & Allison's (2003) move model. Based on the analysis, both similarities and differences regarding the move occurrence, move-ordering patterns, and move cyclicity were found. The marked differences of the two corpora were in the step employment. The findings obtained in the current study are useful particularly for novice non-native writers by facilitating them to better understand the rhetorical structure of research article Discussions in the different publication contexts. In addition, they may provide L2 teachers with insight into effective instructional strategies to help EFL/ESL learners acquire pragmatic knowledge of the rhetorical structure of research article Discussions.
The present study aimed to investigate the evolution of the rhetorical structure of research article discussions in three prestigious journals covering the two chronological periods of 1980--1989 (group A) and 2005--2010 (group B). It also studied changes in the application of the two most frequently used verb tenses − the simple present tense and the simple past tense − over the two time periods. Overall, 115 published articles were selected from the aforementioned journals. Move analysis was accomplished through application of Dudley--Evans' (1994) model on the datasets. Findings indicated that despite the overall consistency in utilizing the nine--move organization, there emerged rather considerable differences in the frequency of (Un) expected outcome and Explanation moves. A reduction in the frequency of (Un) expected outcome in group B indicated that present--day writers announce results with more caution to win the acquiescence of reviewers and readers. On the other hand, a rise in explanations revealed a growing concern for including more arguments in order to follow the analytical nature of the discussion section. The results also demonstrated a shift from the simple present tense toward the simple past tense, which marks a shift from generalization to specificity.
A Structural Move Analysis of Discussion Sub-Genre in Applied Linguistics
Dacoromania, 2012
The current study aimed at finding the probable differences between the move structure of Iranian MA graduates’ thesis discussion subgenres and those of their non-Iranian counterparts, on the one hand, and those of journal paper authors, on the other. It also aimed at identifying the moves that are considered obligatory, conventional, or optional by Iranian MA graduates. 46 (N = 46) masters thesis ‘discussion’ sections taken randomly from a pool of 93 discussions written in English by Iranian EFL students comprised the corpus for this study. The AntMover software as well as two human coders identified and coded the moves found in the corpus. The resulting move frequencies were compared to those of Rasmeenin’s (2006) study as well as Yang and Allison’s (2003) framework using a set of Mann-Whitney U tests as well as One-Sample t-Tests. Results indicated that there is a significant difference in the move frequency of the discussion sub-genre of MA theses written by Iranian versus non-Iranian EFL students. There was also a significant difference in the move frequency of the discussion sub-genre of MA theses written by Iranian EFL students and the discussion sub-genre of journal papers published in internationally recognized applied-linguistic journals. Obligatory, conventional, and optional moves were also identified. It was concluded that academic writing teachers need to focus on move structures and make their students move-sensitive.
JEELS (Journal of English Education and Linguistics Studies), 2021
This study aimed at: 1) investigating the move and steps found in quantitative and qualitative research articles discussion; 2) investigating the rhetoric structure patterns of quantitative and qualitative research article discussion. This study is a qualitative-research focusing on genre analysis on qualitative and quantitative RA discussions. There were 20 qualitative and 20 quantitative research article discussions of EFL and applied linguistics journals were investigated in this research. Using Yang & Allison's (2003) framework to analyze the data, it is found that all moves in the framework were employed in RA discussion of both qualitative and quantitative research. However, the number of occurrences of each move were different between discussion section of these two different approaches. Furthermore, the patterns of both qualitative and quantitative RA discussion was not significantly different. There were two types of patterns in RA discussion both in qualitative and quantitative, repetitive pattern and organized pattern. although there were some variations in each of those patterns. The present study provides more evidence of generic structure of RA discussion section as well as proposes some useful insights related to move analysis on research article discussion in ELT and Linguistics area. Limitations and recommendations are discussed in this study.
Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics, 2018
The abstract is an important part of any research articles. In recent years, many pedagogical approaches have realized that lack of proper writing support in writing research article abstract can frustrate the writers and make their research paper less-effective. The present study present rhetorical move analysis of the research article abstracts by employing Hyland's 2010 model of move analysis. The data was collected from the two volumes of the National University of Modern Languages' Journal of Critical Inquiry. The results show that the purpose move is the most frequent move, while the conclusion move is the most lest frequent in the abstract published in the Journal of Critical Inquiry. The present study suggests that the researchers use the purpose move in their abstracts with the highest frequency and are less inclined to use conclusion move.
Phraseologies in the Discussion Section of Applied Linguistics Research Articles
The Discussion section, one of the main parts of a research article, plays a crucial role in revealing how research findings are interpreted and how they contribute to studied disciplines. Feak and Swales (2012), however, observe that writing the Discussion section is challenging for both native and non-native speakers. Based on a corpus of Discussion texts from130 applied linguistics research articles that use quantitative data, the present study aims at identifying salient phraseologies, and exploring how they are distributed in the rhetorical structure of the Discussion section. To achieve this aim, the study adopts the corpus linguistics approach of Sinclair (1987, 1991) as the method of identifying phraseologies. It also analyses these phraseologies to explore their discourse functions. The study then maps these phraseologies onto the rhetorical structure, by drawing on an analytical framework for the Discussion section of applied linguistics empirical research articles. This framework is built from two sources: the Move-Step framework outlined by Yang and Allison (2003), and Basturkmen’s (2009) “fine-grained” descriptions of the Explaining theresult Step in Yang and Allison’s framework, and is referred to as the YAB framework. The study demonstrates in detail how the salient phraseologies are distributed in specific Moves and Steps described in the YAB framework. Furthermore, the present study refines and extends the YAB framework, by providing detailed descriptions of linguistic features, the internal structures(Move cycles and embeddings),and communicative functions of several Moves and Steps in the Discussion section of applied linguistics research articles using quantitative data. The findings also suggest that the use of phraseologies strongly manifests, and is conditioned by the research article genre. The study hasseveral pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for students, especially for those from non-English language backgrounds.
The Asian ESP Journal, 2020
The present study aimed to examine the rhetorical structure of the method sections of English and Persian research articles. To this end, 300 method sections were randomly selected from research articles published in established international English, Iranian local English, and Iranian local Persian journals in Applied Linguistics from 2010 to 2016. Following Lim’s(2006) model, we analyzed the articles for the generic patterns in the method section. Findings showed that the writers of Persian research articles used a significantly greater number of moves in developing the research method section than those of international and local English articles.Moreover, despite variations, there were similarities between international and Iranian local English journals in terms of utilizing moves and steps.
2017
The study investigated whether there was any significant generic difference between the Research Questions (RQs) and Method sections of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) published in international and local Iranian journals. Two hundred applied linguistics RAs (100 from each group) were selected from 5 SSCI-indexed international journals and 5 Iranian Scientific-Research (Elmi-Pazhouheshi) ISC-indexed journals. Having analyzed the Introduction and Method sections based on Swales’ (2004) CARS model and Lim’s (2006) model, respectively, we found there were no significant differences in the frequency of occurrence of RQs in the Introduction sections, on the one hand, and between the Method sections of both groups of RAs, on the other. However, significant differences were found in the frequency of occurrence of certain moves and steps in both sections. Moreover, the findings of an expert-viewed validated questionnaire indicated that the RQs were of paramount importance to the...