Academic conflict in Applied Linguistics research article discussions: The case of native and non-native writers

Abstract

Among the significant tasks faced by academic writers are establishing their expertise in negotiating their new research findings, and resolving tensions between current knowledge and previous claims. These little-explored areas contrast with the attention devoted to examining basic moves and steps in different parts of research articles. The present article implements Hunston's (1993) conceptualization of academic conflict by native and non-native writers when composing the discussion section of papers written in their L1 and L2. To this end, three types of Applied Linguistics research articles were selected as the main corpus of the study: 20 English papers written by native speakers of English, 20 English papers written by non-native speakers of English, and 20 Persian papers written by native speakers of Persian. The analyses revealed that English papers (whether written by native or non-native writers) included more academic conflict structures compared to Persian research articles. However, in terms of the distinct components of academic conflict, English and Persian articles contained a similar number of recurrent proposed and opposed claim structures. The main area of difference between English papers (written by natives) and Persian articles was in the use of inconsistency indicators and conflict resolution.