An Analysis of Structural Bundles Clustered within Rhetorical Moves of Qualitative and Quantitative Discussion Section of Research Articles

Abstract

One of the most significant activities that writers can engage in to share their knowledge and establish a voice within the disciplinary community is writing academic research articles. To have a greater understanding of this commonly practiced genre, exploring the linguistic realisations which are used to classify the rhetorical structures of academic research articles is beneficial. This study’s main objective was to analyse structural bundles clustered in rhetorical moves in the Discussion parts of the specialised corpora of qualitative and quantitative datasets of Applied Linguistics Research articles (RAs), wherein each corpus contains Discussion sections of 50 RAs, as well as structural elements of those lexical bundles. For rhetorical move identification, the data were analysed based on Ruiying and Allison’s (2003) model. For lexical bundle analysis, the corpus-driven approach was used to extract four-word lexical bundles. Hence, the data were analysed using Biber et al.'s (1999) structural taxonomy. The analysis of Discussion sections identified some discrepancies in terms of lexical bundle frequency, which has also shown that some moves incorporated more bundles as compared to others. In terms of similarity of usage, the two groups of RA writers significantly used phrasal more than clausal. RA writers used more NP-based bundles at the expense of other phrasal sub-categories. The results of the current study provides insightful knowledge of genre convention as well as cluster of lexical bundles in Qualitative and Quantitative research articles. This knowledge enables authors, especially novice ones, to dive into their academic writing approach.