Textual Organisation and Linguistic Features in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: Moving From Introduction to Methods

Abstract

Writing and publishing research articles (RAs) in English is crucial because an RA is considered as one of the channels to communicate among researchers and scholars worldwide. Research publication has become one of the requirements for Thai graduate students before graduation; however writing for publication is a daunting task to them as it requires substantial writing skills to ensure that researchers can efficiently present research findings and express themselves in response to textual convention and academic community. This paper centres on the rhetorical structures and linguistic features commonly used in the Introduction and Methods sections of the RA genre as written in a particular set of journals. Inspired by Swales' analytical framework (1990; and work by Biber, Conner and Upton's (2007) steps of conducting a move analysis, this study examined 25 RA Introduction and Methods sections in the field of applied linguistics. These RAs were analysed by genre analysis into 'moves' and 'steps'. The results revealed that each section displayed a generic pattern, comprising a series of moves and steps. Lexicogrammatical features associated with a communicative function were also identified. Pedagogically, the findings generated by this study could be useful for teaching students how to write scholarly publications in EAP classrooms. The structural patterns and linguistic features found to functionally interact with one other may facilitate the understanding of novice writers and Thai graduates of published research articles in these sections. Moreover, the rhetorical patterns generated by this study might be meaningful for teachers in implementing relevant reading and writing materials for advanced learners to improve their writing skills to effectively disseminate discoveries in their fields.

Non-Native Speakers’ Rhetorical Commonalities in Writing Script Introduction Section

“…Suryani et al (2014) also use that model toward English written text by Malaysian. Then, Khamkhien (2015) also conducts the research by using this model toward Thai journal.…”

Signalling Reflexivity and Complexity: A Step Analysis of Methods Sections in Qualitative Social Science Research

“…All the articles selected were empirical: review articles, essays and articles of a descriptive or narrative nature were excluded. Regarding the corpus size, although some previous studies of academic genres used samples consisting of only 10 (Chang & Swales, 1999;Pramoolsook et al, 2015), 20 (Lim, 2006) or 25 (Khamkhien, 2015) examples to represent a discipline, a consensus is emerging that a sample of 30 texts provides more reliable results (Cotos et al, 2017;Hyland, 2002;Zhang, 2022). In the journals in the present study, the methods sections were almost always labelled as such.…”

“…The absence of these steps from previous analyses of social science methods might be due to the fact that previous researchers did not consider them relevant. However, it is also likely that they reflect disciplinary differences: previous research centred mainly on management (Lim, 2006;Pramoolsook et al, 2015) or applied linguistics (Farnia & Baratizade, 2020;Khamkhien, 2015), where concerns with researcher reflexivity and ethical treatment of subjects may be less pressing. Some differences may also reflect ongoing developments in research practices (for example, it is now conventional to include institutional ethics clearance).…”

“…A recent comparative study by Farnia and Baratizade (2020) followed Lim's 9-step framework to analyse the moves in methods in applied linguistics articles in English and Persian, again finding relatively high homogeneity, although there were some differences between language groups. Also in applied linguistics, Khamkhien (2015), using a similar framework, found that all sections included accounts of the sample, research instruments and procedures. However, we should be aware that applied linguistics covers a range of perspectives, and many text-based studies reflect a quantitative paradigm, while some kinds of classroom-based study involving approaches such as participant research or ethnography are qualitative.…”