Data-driven analysis of the development of linguistic features in research articles on optics

Abstract

Researchers must constantly produce academic publications to promote their contributions and findings. The Research Article (RA) genre consists of sub-genres based on the typical IMRAD (Introduction, Method, Result and Discussion) structure that is commonly used for research in science and engineering. Researchers still find difficulties in learning systematically how to write RAs during university education. Although essential for teaching, learning, and applications, the genre-based analysis of the RA genre is still considered to be difficult and complex. In order to assist EST students and researchers in building the structure of their RA and communicating ideas with appropriate linguistic expressions, and as part of a longitudinal research, this study focuses on the analysis of RAs based on rhetorical moves and the comparison with other RAs on the same domain of expertise. This study analyzed 1,384 articles from the Journal of Optics between 2002 and 2004 using an originally developed corpus tool, ULC (Universal Learning Concordancer). Word lists, n-grams, clusters, and words in context are going to be displayed among others. Results are discussed in comparison with previous stages of this longitudinal study.