The Study of Rhetorical Moves in Applied Linguistics Research-Based Articles Written by Iranian Researchers

Abstract

This study discussed rhetorical features of Iranian applied linguistics research articles (RAs) in English. The main focus of this research is on the examination of the patterns of communicative purposes or “moves” and their subsequent elements or “steps” of different sections of these articles. The researchers randomly chose 30 research articles from four Iranian journals of applied linguistics published within five recent years (2008-2012). The analysis includes the examination of communicative purposes of the texts following Pho’s (2008b) model of move analysis in applied linguistics research articles. For the ease of comparison, this corpus was compared with Pho’s (2008b) corpus of study. The results showed that the macro rhetorical structure of the Iranian research articles is relatively similar to that of non-Iranian RAs with some minor differences. However the communicative purposes in different sections in the two groups of RAs (Iranian and non-Iranian) are relatively different. The pedagogical implication of this study is that the English RAs genre needs to be explicitly taught to Iranian researchers.