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 paper presents an analysis of the major generic structures of empirical research articles (RAs), with a particular focus on disciplinary variation and the relationship between the adjacent sections in the introductory and concluding parts. The findings were derived from a close "manual" analysis of 433 recent empirical RAs from high-impact…

This study investigates the use of "this" and "these" as pronouns versus determiners in a corpus of research articles in Applied Linguistics and Materials and Civil Engineering. The study reveals that authors in the two disciplines use both structures in a similar manner, with pronominal uses constituting one-fifth of all occurrences. Five types…

Writing the Discussion section of a laboratory report or dissertation is difficult for students to master. It involves complex causal, conditional and purposive argument; this argument guides the reader from acceptance of the relatively uncontroversial data to acceptance of the writer's knowledge claim. Students benefit therefore if they are…

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…

This research focuses on the structural construction of scientific titles in English and Spanish in research papers (RP) and review papers (RVP) in the biological and social sciences. The questions raised were (i) whether structural construction is a key distinctive feature between RP and RVP titles; (ii) whether the inherent peculiarities of…

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.…

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…

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…

The notion that academic writing is not only a conventional entity but also carries the representation of the writer has been supported by several researchers. Few studies have explored identity representation in language across two written cultures, such as English and Spanish, although Spanish might be a language of interest for non-native…

Recent critical views on the usefulness of a general academic vocabulary have heightened the relevance of developing discipline specific academic wordlists to meet the needs of non-native English writers who must read and publish articles in English. Using Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, we set out to identify the academic words in a corpus…

This paper focuses on textual issues in the reporting of action research. There exists a large body of text-analytical work on research reports from various fields, examining for example the organisation and rhetorical purpose of research articles or sections thereof. However, less has been done on the specific issues of reporting action research,…

A genre-based analysis of 20 sociology research articles was used to present a provisional, pedagogically usable description of the communicative categories or "moves" found in the Results sections. The categories (described in terms of function, lexis, and grammatical form) extend and refine previous models and provide evidence of…

Based on a questionnaire to academic staff, this article examines the reading and writing tasks assigned to undergraduate science students at a South African university. The article finds that although academic staff in science value clearly written and well-organised writing, few see it as their task to induct students into this literacy. Instead…