Evaluations of prior scholarship play a crucial role in the literature review (LR) of a research article by showing how the boundary of an area of inquiry can be further advanced by the writer's work. Yet, many inexperienced writers find evaluating others' work a major challenge. Although the task has received some attention in research and…

Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by…

Using (Swales, 1990) and (Swales, 2004) Create-A-Research-Space model (CARS) as an investigative tool and Hyland's (2005) model of metadiscourse, this article reports on a pragmatic two-level rhetorical analysis of the constituent moves and steps of research article introductions and focuses on the identification and mapping of the metadiscoursal…

This article highlights aspects of an interdisciplinary (chemistry-applied linguistics) English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course- and materials-development project. The project was aimed at raising genre awareness among chemistry students and faculty, in addition to improving students' disciplinary reading and writing. As part of the project,…

This paper is a preliminary investigation into how the context of student life influences student writing. Specifically, activity theory is drawn upon to explore how the role of assessment affects students' attempts to participate in knowledge-producing communities, a relatively under-researched aspect of student writing. To identify rhetorical…

This paper reports a genre study of the Results sections of two samples of 20 research-reporting articles from two disciplines: sociology and organic chemistry. Following the proposal of Bhatia (2004) that genre knowledge needs to be investigated from two perspectives, an "ethnographic perspective" and a "textual perspective," the Results sections…

EAP practitioners in advanced courses have often focused on assisting junior scholars who are non-native speakers of English with their attempts to publish in English. Today, however, university administrators increasingly rely on post-publication data such as citation records. We therefore suggest that identifying heavily cited and largely…

This research compiled two corpora, one for English-medium textbooks for business core courses (totaling 7.2 million running words) and the other for business research articles (7.62 million tokens), to form a basis of analysis. The results show that knowledge of the most frequent 3500 word families and 5000 word families plus proper nouns would…

The process of writing journal articles is increasingly being seen as a collaborative process, especially where the authors are English as an Additional Language (EAL) academics. This study examines the changes made in terms of register to EAL writers' journal articles by a native-speaker writing centre advisor at a private university in Turkey.…

This paper reports a corpus-based genre analysis of the structural and linguistic evolution of medical research articles (RAs) written in English. Towards that end, we analyzed the frequency of occurrence of the 11 moves identified by Nwogu (1997), of the three most frequently used verb tenses (simple past, simple present and present perfect) and…

It is now widely recognized that self-promotion in academic discourse varies across disciplines. Whereas most analysts focus on publicization techniques in natural and social sciences, the humanities have received much less attention. This article investigates the strategies associated with promotional (meta)discourse in the humanities. In…

This study aims to evaluate the selection of metaphors in a published business English textbook using findings from a specialised corpus of written business English. While most scholars agree that metaphors should be included in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) syllabuses as a potentially problematic area in successful language learning, it is…

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that…

There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but…

This paper compares the rhetorical organization of research article introductions in Brazilian Portuguese and in English within a subfield of Applied Linguistics. Using Swales' (1990) CARS model as an analytical tool, this exploratory study investigated 20 research articles. The findings indicate that introductions in Brazilian Portuguese tend to…