A Comparison of Rhetorical Move Structure of Applied Linguistics Research Articles Published in International and National Thai Journals

Abstract

The rhetorical organization of research articles has attracted extensive attention in genre study, and the focus of move-based analysis is on the textual function. The primary aim of the present study was the comparison of the rhetorical moves of English research articles in the field of Applied Linguistics written by Thai first authors and published in national Thai journals with those written by authors of different nationalities and published in international journals. Each of the two corpora was represented by 30 English research articles with sections of introduction, method, results and discussion. These sections were examined according to different move models: Introduction: Swales (2004), Methods: Peacock (2011), and Results and Discussion: Yang and Allison (2003). The study provided detailed rhetorical structures of research articles from both corpora with linguistic features used in each move. It was found that the frequency of rhetorical move occurrence of the two corpora was quite similar, but there were some differences in how gaps in research were established and in how credibility of the data analysis was gained. The findings of this study provide a picture of how research articles of the two corpora are written. This may lead to implications for English for Academic Purposes teachers and researchers and novice writers in Applied Linguistics.

Applying the Bundle–Move Connection Approach to the Development of an Online Writing Support Tool for Research Articles

“…Furthermore, this line of research has expanded to encompass the whole body (i.e., all sections) of research articles since Nwogu's (1997) study, in which the rhetorical moves and their constituent elements (i.e., steps) of medical research papers were examined by applying move analysis. Similar undertakings have been carried out for research articles in various fields (Kanoksilapatham, 2005;Shi & Wannaruk, 2014;Stoller & Robinson, 2013;Wannaruk & Amnuai, 2015).…”

“…Thus, in this study, we decided to focus on one specific discipline, applied linguistics, and thoroughly investigate the moves and lexical bundles within that discipline as a first step toward incorporating various academic disciplines. We chose applied linguistics because introduction, methods, results, and discussion move models have been suggested for this discipline in previous studies (e.g., Pho, 2013;Wannaruk & Amnuai, 2015) and because our own interests and areas of competence lie in this discipline.…”

“…As comprehensive as Pho's move framework was, however, it seemed necessary to modify the classification in two research article sections (see items marked with an asterisk in Table 1). First, Pho's framework included only two moves (describing the data and data collection procedure, describing the data analysis procedure) in the method section, while previous research article move analysis studies have conventionally had more than two moves for this section (e.g., Cotos, Huffman, & Link, 2017;Kanoksilapatham, 2005;Wannaruk & Amnuai, 2015). Thus, in our study, we divided the method section into four moves: (a) describing the sample, (b) describing research instruments, (c) describing the procedures, and (d) describing the data analysis procedure.…”

Analyses of Rhetorical Moves and Linguistic Realizations in Accounting Research Article Abstracts Published in International and Thai-Based Journals

“…Based on these definitions, a move is a semantic unit of texts that is linked to the writer's purpose. Identifying text units in terms of communicative purpose is considered to be one of the ways to turn teachers' and students' attention away from mere surface structures of text to the socially situated use of texts with specific intentions (Hüttner, Smit, & Mehlmauer-Larcher, 2009;Wannaruk & Amnuai, 2016). By focusing on discourse, communications made by writers would not only be valuable for text reading but also for pedagogical implication.…”

Multilingual Research Writing beyond English: The Case of Norwegian Academic Discourse in an Era of Multilingual Publication Practices

“…There is ample precedence for applying the model in this way. Previous studies have applied the model to texts written in Hungarian [40], Arabic [41,42], Polish [43], Thai [44,45], Spanish [46,47], Brazilian Portuguese [48], Chinese [49][50][51], Swedish [52] and Tamil [16]. Most of these studies have applied the model in a contrastive perspective in order to compare the rhetorical structure of texts written in English with the rhetorical structure of texts written in another language.…”