Evaluative stance in academic arguments

Lexical Bundles (LBs) have been considered an effective tool for not only academic writing but also spoken discourse. The use of these clusters has attracted a lot of researchers in different registers because of their characteristics and functions in constructing the texts. However, research into LBs seems to be quite rare in English Applied Linguistics (AL) Research Articles (RAs) written by non-native English researchers, especially Vietnamese researchers. This study, therefore, aims to scrutinise Vietnamese researchers’ use of LBs in English AL RAs. A corpus of 77 AL RAs selected from three Journals was built. This study adapted the theoretical frameworks by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999), Biber, Conrad, and Cortes (2004) and Biber (2006) for data analysis. The findings revealed that Vietnamese researchers tended to deploy noun-based LBs more than verb-based and preposition-based ones in their AL RAs. It was further found LBs showing research-oriented functions were prevalent in AL RAs over text-oriented and participant-oriented ones. This research has pedagogical implications in terms of LB use for Vietnamese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and learners in the teaching and learning of academic writing.

Stance, a crucial aspect of academic writing, is complex and vital for both beginner and advanced writers. However, L2 English learners and experienced writers frequently struggle with using stance markers effectively. Currently, there remains a scarcity of research comparing the utilisation of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles between native English professional writers and L1 Indonesian speakers. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating similarities and differences in the deployment of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles by authors with L1 Indonesian and L1 English backgrounds and discussing the educational implications derived from the analysis results. The analysis involves two corpora: the Indonesian academic corpus (IAC), comprising articles authored by L1 Indonesians, and the English academic corpus (EAC), consisting of articles by native English speakers. The study investigates various types of stance markers and their distribution across the corpora, revealing significant differences in their usage. L2 English authors employ more boosters and attitude markers, while L1 English writers use more hedges and self-mentions, with the most notable disparities observed in the usage of self-references. These findings underscore the necessity for educators, particularly within the Indonesian context, to sensitise learners to the discursive norms surrounding the use of stance markers in applied linguistics research articles and provide targeted instruction to enhance English learners’ proficiency in employing stance markers effectively.

This study examines the correlation between the theory of pragmatic discourse of givenness and CP adverbial clauses from the two datasets: Q1 SCOPUS applied linguistics research articles and Thai undergraduate students’ writing. The first set was 24 applied linguistics research articles from journals of English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes. There were 45 tokens of adverbial clauses. Another set of data collection was 35 participants, majoring in English, whose English proficiency was A2 or elementary based on their Oxford Placement Test. The second dataset contained 31 tokens of CP adverbial clauses in descriptive and narrative writing. Data was analyzed using Pearson Correlation in SPSS29. The first section showed there was a statistically significant relationship between the theory of pragmatic discourse of givenness and CP adverbial clauses in applied linguistics research articles where the p-value was reported at 0.011. The reasons why CP adverbial clauses are used are due to giving the arguments from previous studies. This implied that the SCOPUS writers knew well how to use CP adverbial clauses regarding form, functions and genre. In contrast, the results in the second dataset showed there was a statistically significant relationship between the CP adverbial clauses and non-givenness produced by Thai undergraduate students where the p-value was reported at 0.001. Accordingly, Thai private university students whose English proficiency was elementary used CP adverbial clauses arbitrarily; non-reasonable. This implies that they knew form, but they did not know what are the function CP adverbial clauses which were applied in different genres. It is expected that the results in this study will help Thai undergraduate students improve their usage of CP adverbial clauses accurately and appropriately.

Linguistic expressions of interest instantiated by interesting, intriguing, and fascinating that signal the authorial stance are not uncommon in applied linguistics research articles. Nevertheless, they have received little scholarly attention. This paper, taking a cognitive semantic approach, reports on a study that sought to examine how linguistically expressed interest in applied linguistics research articles is leveraged by researchers’ geo-academic location (the Core vs. the Periphery). Drawing on a semantic frame generated for interest markers in academic writing, this study focused on the incidence of the various elements of the Interest frame in the discipline of applied linguistics based on a mixed-methods approach. The corpus-based quantitative analyses found that academic writers’ geo-academic location was a robust predictor of authors’ overall use of interest markers and some frame elements associated with the Interest frame. Triangulation with the interview data obtained from disciplinary specialists revealed that the observed differences could be attributable to the hierarchical academia featuring periphery-based scholars’ unequal access to the knowledge production market and under-representation.

The rhetorical organization of discussions sections of qualitative research articles in Applied Linguistics and the use of meta-discourse markers

Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, there exist few widely acknowledged rating scales or checklists for evaluating manuscripts submitted to journals in applied linguistics. To top it all, the existent peer-reviewing criteria are typically not publicly shared; thus, peer-reviewing is a closed, occluded genre. To fill this lacuna in applied linguistics, this research critically analyzed the evaluation scales, existing review criteria, and available documents from 18 journals, two publishing institutions, and APA guidelines in order to come up with a comprehensive checklist for evaluating research articles in applied linguistics. The analysis of the data through inductive content analysis revealed 43 categories, which were later classified under six main themes. It was found that researchers must be aware of the practicalities of research, include the essentials in their manuscript, and appeal to editors by adding elements of face validity. Having met these requirements, researchers must enjoy excellent composition skills and adhere to the fundamental principles in research ethics in order to be able to write a research paper having high overall value. The paper concludes with several implications for researchers and opens up some avenues for future research.

Specificity and generality of lexical bundles in the rhetorical moves of Applied Linguistics research article introductions

Research articles have received a wide interest in discourse studies particularly in genre analysis over the last few decades. A vast number of studies have been centered on identifying the organizational patterns of research articles in various fields. While Introduction section has enjoyed a lot of attention, very few studies have focused on rhetorical structure of qualitative and quantitative research articles. This genre-based investigation reports on a study of the Introduction sections of 15 qualitative and 15 quantitative research articles in Applied Linguistics from five high impact journals published from 2008-2012. Based on Swales’ (2004) move structure model, this study focuses on Move 3 (introducing the present work) and examines how qualitative and quantitative research article writers introduce their work in Introduction section. The analysis revealed that there were similarities in the overall presence and use of steps in both groups, some differences in the overall presence and frequency of directive determinants were obvious which could be attributed to the different nature of these research designs.

Generative linguists claim that the argument of the matrix verb as in Mary seemed to be innocent is the DP (determine phrase), which is the raised argument of the to-infinitive clause being raised to be landed in the Spec T. However, the current study argues that the DP argument as the subject of the matrix verb seems to be the given DP and this is supported by functional linguistics. The argument in this study is statistically supported by the empirical evidence of international applied linguistic research articles. The data collection was English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which were indexed in the Q1 SCOPUS database. A total number of approximately 250,000 words was derived from 25 applied linguistics research articles, which contained 47 tokens concerning the argument with the matrix verb seem. The data analysis was divided into the framework of syntactic analysis and the quantitative study of inferential statistical analysis. The framework of syntactic analysis follows functional linguistics called the pragmatic discourse of givenness. The statistical analysis in this study was Pearson Correlation in SPSS29. The results showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between the given DP of the matrix verb seem and applied linguistic research articles. The p-value was reported at 0.044. Thus, the hypothesis in this study was accepted. The discussion follows the principle of cohesion and fixed colligations. It is recommended that the hypothesis in this study be tested by other English materials, such as novels and business documents, to contribute to the field.

This study intends to investigate the realizations and functional patterns of shell nouns in Applied Linguistics research articles. To this end, fifty research articles in the field of Applied Linguistic were selected from Journal of English for Academic Purposes and journal of English for Specific Purposes published by Elsevier. The articles were analyzed for the realizations of shell nouns based on the list suggested by Hinkel (2004). As to the functional patterns, Schmid’s (2000) classification of functional patterns of shell nouns was also adopted. Findings reported that some shell nouns are used more frequently while some were put aside. Findings also reported that writers of research articles in the field of Applied Linguistics used functional patterns suggested by Schmid (2000). Findings of this study could have implications by raising the awareness of writers of Applied Linguistics research articles, especially in EFL contexts, concerning the use of shell nouns and functional patterns in which shell nouns are used.

The main objective of this study is to assess the levels of statistical use (basic, intermediate, and advanced) in Applied Linguistics research articles over the past three decades (from 1986 to 2015). The corpus included 4079 quantitative and mixed-methods studies published in ten prominent journals of Applied Linguistics. The articles were analysed and the statistical techniques used were aggregated by two current writers and four PhD students in TEFL. Results showed that descriptive statistics (40.04%) were by far the most commonly used technique followed by one-way ANOVA (14.91%), t-test (10.15%), and Pearson correlation (8.76%). Regarding the sophistication level of statistical use, about 78.77% (n = 4686) of the techniques were classified as basic, 14.49% (n = 862) as intermediate, and 6.74% (n = 401) as advanced. Clearly, most of the techniques were either basic or intermediate, with a significant higher percentage for the former. So, a person with basic knowledge of statistics could understand 69.03% of the papers published during 1986 to 2015. It is discussed that researchers should be updated on recent statistical knowledge if they wish to statistically comprehend research articles published in Applied Linguistics journals.

During the last two decades, numerous studies have focused on linguistic features of academic writing. One of these features, which appears frequently in academic writing and which writers need to improve their use of, is the it-extraposition construction. The existing literature on subject it-extraposition has focused on syntactic analysis (types and patterns) of this construction and little attention has been paid to semantic analysis (meanings); thus, this study aims to explore the types, patterns and meanings of subject it-extraposition used in Applied Linguistics research articles. The study was run on a corpus of 57 Applied Linguistics research articles, wherein the common extraposed subject clauses were the that-clause followed by the infinitive to-clause. It was also evident that minimal attention was devoted to the use of the wh-clause and the -ing participle clause. Concerning patterns of it-extraposition subject clause, subject + predicate and subject + predicate + complement were the most commonly utilised in Applied Linguistics research articles. The findings showed that Applied Linguistics writers were more concerned with expressing and evaluating their opinions and claims semantically. This study could help novice writers, especially novice non-native writers, to increase their awareness regarding how such construction is used syntactically and semantically by expert writers in writing research articles.

Stance is a feature of academic writing that refers to how writers interact and engage with their readers by means of linguistic devices. This study focuses on the grammatical devices—and semantic distinctions thereof—that are employed by academic writers of English to express stance in research article abstracts in the areas of applied linguistics (AL) and literature (L). To this end, a corpus of 120 research article abstracts (60 in the area of AL and another 60 in that of L) was built and analysed using SPSS and following Biber et al.’s (1999) framework of grammatical devices of stance. The abstracts were extracted from high-quality journals in the respective areas: Applied Linguistics and English: Journal of the English Association. Both are ISI journals and published by Oxford Academic Publishing. A mixed-method approach, applying quantitative and qualitative measures, was adopted to answer the two questions: How is stance grammatically expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts, and How is the expression of stance in AL research article abstracts similar to/different from that in L ones? The findings are construed in light of theories of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The results reveal that there are important similarities and differences in the extent to which and the means through which stance is expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts. In particular, the findings show that both AL and L abstracts were similar in the most frequently used stance marker which is the stance complement clause. However, they were different in the frequency of use of other devices. The study provides insights into the ways academic writers express stance in various fields which better our ability to write research article abstracts.

Research on academic writing in general, and on the research article genre in particular, has investigated the generic structure of the Abstract, or of the Introduction section of the research article, with little attention being paid to other sections (Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions). Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study investigates the move structures of all the sections of the research article, including the Abstract. The study explores the sequencing and structure of moves, and how linguistic features are used to realize authorial stance in the moves. The data are drawn from a randomly selected corpus of forty recent research articles from two key journals in each of two disciplines, applied linguistics and educational technology. The findings show that there are some differences between the two closely-related disciplines in terms of move structure and typical linguistic features of moves. However more significant is the finding that authorial stance, as expressed in linguistic realizations of moves, varies systematically across moves in both disciplines. The study provides a comprehensive description of the move structure of the entire research article in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, and of the typical linguistic features of the moves in different sections. The work builds on earlier research on research articles, in particular that of Swales, to develop an integrated analytic framework that might be used to study research articles in a range of disciplines.

This chapter discusses pertinent research on the structure of research articles from the field of applied linguistics, including the macro-organization of the main sections in articles and patterns in use of rhetorical features, such as metadiscourse and academic criticism. Studies have revealed the importance of particular rhetorical functions, such as the use of alternative explanations in commenting on results in applied linguistics research articles (Basturkmen, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 241–251, 2009) while also pointing to intra-disciplinary variation in academic norms. In addition, studies have identified a variety of metadiscoursal features used to establish author presence and academic criticism that varies across sections. Following the discussion of features of the applied linguistics research article, the chapter focuses on pedagogical issues related to the instruction of writing the research article, such as rhetorical consciousness raising and the use of annotated corpora. The chapter also presents the novice writer with some questions to consider when constructing a research article in applied linguistics.