Arsalan Yaghoobi; Mohammad Amini Farsani; Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli; Ali Asghar Taghizadeh
Abstract
Despite paradigmatic research advancements and movements in applied linguistics, the issue of rhetoric, which serves as one of the fundamental pillars of each paradigm, remains largely unaccounted for. Considering the commensurability of argumentation and meta-analysis, coupled with the increasing rate ...
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Despite paradigmatic research advancements and movements in applied linguistics, the issue of rhetoric, which serves as one of the fundamental pillars of each paradigm, remains largely unaccounted for. Considering the commensurability of argumentation and meta-analysis, coupled with the increasing rate of meta-analytic studies in the field of applied linguistics, there arises a need to examine the argumentation behavior of applied linguistics’ meta-analysts. As such, following research synthesis techniques and an argument mining approach, we examined the academic argumentation genre of meta-analysis published in leading applied linguistics journals through argument-mining techniques in light of the modified Toulmin framework proposed by Qin and Karabacak (2010). The current study, employing the modified Toulmin framework, examined the argumentative writing components represented in the introduction section of 54 meta-analytic studies published in leading journals of applied linguistics through argument-mining techniques. Our findings highlight the complexity and argumentativeness of the meta-analysis genre. We further found that the Modified Toulmin Model is implementable for the task of argument mining, which can have a great impact on argumentation, meta-analysis, and argumentative academic writing. Implications and recommendations for academic argumentative writers and meta-analyzers are discussed.
Rajab Esfandiari; Mohammad Ahmadi; Aynur Ismayilli Karakoç
Abstract
There is currently a growing tendency to a meaning-based approach to the analysis of syntactic complexity in academic writing. While previous studies have offered illuminating insights into linguistic realizations of rhetorical structures in relation to syntactic complexity, they have typically analyzed ...
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There is currently a growing tendency to a meaning-based approach to the analysis of syntactic complexity in academic writing. While previous studies have offered illuminating insights into linguistic realizations of rhetorical structures in relation to syntactic complexity, they have typically analyzed lexicogrammatical features in a decontextualized manner. Drawing on a corpus-based cross-sectional design, this study takes a function-first approach to investigating the rhetorical functions of syntactically complex structures in research article (RA) abstracts in applied linguistics. To that end, a corpus of 270 texts from leading applied linguistics journals was constructed. Based on the model proposed by Pho (2008), we manually annotated the texts for the moves, and measured their syntactic complexity using phrasal, clausal, and global metrics. SPSS (version 25) was run for the analysis of data. Results of one-way MANOVA (multivariate analysis of variance) and Chi-square tests revealed significant variations among rhetorical moves in terms of clausal and phrasal complexity measures. The findings also showed that academic writers varied the complexity of their written structures according to their rhetorical goals. The results establish form-meaning mappings between syntactically complex structures and rhetorical functions. The findings carry pedagogical implications for student writers to adjust their prose using functionally appropriate complex structures following expert writers through comparing their own writing with that of expert writers to notice the gaps.
Amir Zand-Moghadam; Kiyana Zhaleh
Abstract
There is a shortage of studies on the generic structure of research article abstracts published in Iranian and international applied linguistics journals considering their employed research approach (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods). Thus, this study endeavored to analyze the moves ...
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There is a shortage of studies on the generic structure of research article abstracts published in Iranian and international applied linguistics journals considering their employed research approach (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods). Thus, this study endeavored to analyze the moves in 288 quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research (MMR) article abstracts in six Iranian and six international applied linguistics journals published between 2012 and 2019 following Hyland’s (2000) model. To analyze the data, the frequency of distribution and percentages of the rhetorical moves were estimated, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was run on the data. The findings indicated that the moves of Purpose, Product, and Method occupied the largest portion of local and international abstracts. Furthermore, in comparison to the international corpus, the Iranian corpus contained more moves based on Hyland’s (2000) model. A deeper analysis of both corpora revealed that the rhetorical moves were distributed almost evenly within quantitative, qualitative, and MMR abstracts, with the exception that in the international corpus, the Product move appeared significantly less in qualitative abstracts than quantitative and MMR abstracts. The most frequently used move patterns in both datasets were; I-P-M-Pr-C, P-M-Pr-C, P-M-Pr, and I-P-M-Pr. It can be concluded that applied linguistics researchers tend to follow Hyland’s (2000) model as much as possible when writing research article abstracts. Furthermore, although some divergences exist regarding the rhetorical moves frequency of distribution and patterning in qualitative, quantitative, and MMR abstracts in both local and international datasets, similarities are more remarkable than differences. The results can provide practical insights about the rhetorical and discursive practices associated with research article abstracts to applied linguistics researchers, students, and instructors.
Had Farjami
Abstract
Describing the trends and developments in language teaching practice and research has been of considerable interest to the practitioners and researchers involved in the field. This study sought to provide a rough outline of Iranian language teaching research by analyzing a large collection of titles ...
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Describing the trends and developments in language teaching practice and research has been of considerable interest to the practitioners and researchers involved in the field. This study sought to provide a rough outline of Iranian language teaching research by analyzing a large collection of titles from language teaching research reports of Iranian researchers published in English-language academic journals. The 2612 titles came from articles published from winter 2006 to summer 2016. The main source of the articles was 21 journals published in Iran or international journals which featured a considerable number of Iranian authors. In several exploratory rounds of content analysis, the article titles in five language teaching journals were examined to identify their topic areas. Then, by collapsing some of the topics, a final list of topics was prepared. Then, the titles in all journals were examined and the topic area or areas which each covered were tallied. To triangulate this subjective analysis and furnish another frequency report for the topic areas of research in language teaching, the titles were submitted to the text-analyzing software AntConc 3.3.5w (Anthony, 2012), which put out two lists: a frequency-tagged list of two- to seven-word chunks, and a frequency-tagged list of key conceptual words. The subjective content analysis and the machine-based analysis together demonstrated how different sub-fields of language teaching were emphasized and received attention in Iran. The findings help researchers become more informed about the Iranian context and set better priorities. The limitations and weaknesses of the study and some caveats are also discussed.
Shirin Rezaei Keramati; Davud Kuhi; Mahnaz Saeidi
Abstract
Thanks to recent developments in metadiscourse studies, it is now increasingly accepted that metadiscourse practices are closely related to social activities, cognitive styles and epistemological beliefs of academic communities. Despite widespread interest and research among applied linguists to explore ...
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Thanks to recent developments in metadiscourse studies, it is now increasingly accepted that metadiscourse practices are closely related to social activities, cognitive styles and epistemological beliefs of academic communities. Despite widespread interest and research among applied linguists to explore metadiscourse use, very little is known of how metadiscourse resources have evolved over time in response to the historically developing practices of academic communities. Motivated by such an ambition, the current research drew on a corpus of 4.3 million words taken from three leading journals of applied linguistics in order to trace the diachronic evolution of stance and engagement markers across four different sections of research articles (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion/ Conclusion) from 1996 to 2016. Hyland’s (2005b) model of metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis of the selected corpus. The data were explored using concordance software AntConc (Anthony, 2011). Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to determine statistical significances. The analysis revealed a significant decline in the overall frequency of metadiscourse resources in all sections of RAs. Interestingly, this decrease was entirely due to the overall decline in the use of stance markers particularly in result and method sections. It might be argued that, diachronic perspective on metadiscourse contributes to teachers and novice writers’ awareness of the malleability of academic writing and its sensitivity to context as well as providing access to current practices for the creation and delivery of teaching materials in EAP courses.
Saeed Rezaei; Masoumeh Estaji; Mahdi Hasanpour
Volume 2, Issue 1 , February 2015, , Pages 71-43
Abstract
One of the most salient written academic outputs a university student has the opportunity to create is a thesis which is regarded as “a complex student-produced research genre” (Lee & Casal, 2014). In order to compare the rhetorical features and preferences of distinct discourse communities ...
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One of the most salient written academic outputs a university student has the opportunity to create is a thesis which is regarded as “a complex student-produced research genre” (Lee & Casal, 2014). In order to compare the rhetorical features and preferences of distinct discourse communities and evaluate academic writing, a special and long-term attention, on the part of the writers, is required for analyzing the metadiscourse features of the texts (Hyland, 2004). To this end, the present study examined the differences in the use, type, and frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in theses written by M.A. applied linguistics graduates including 10 males and 10 females from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The selected corpus was analyzed using Hyland’s (2005) interactional model of metadiscourse. The data were explored through a manual corpus analysis method using Adobe PDF reader software. Moreover, a Chi-Square statistical measure was run to examine whether there were any significant differences in the use of metadiscourse markers in different thesis chapters and across different genders. The results revealed that although there were some subtle differences in the frequency and types of these metadiscourse markers, there was no statistically significant difference between two genders in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers. Besides, it was concluded that there was a significant relationship between the chapters of theses and the use of metadiscourse markers. The findings of this study render some pedagogical implications for writing courses at M.A. and PhD levels in the realms of TEFL and ESP.
