Providing an Overview of the Research Context: Pedagogical Implications for the Writing of Research Reports in Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Instructors who have taught a course on English for academic purposes at tertiary level may have found that novice students encounter numerous problems comprehending the different parts of the Method section of a research report. While it is difficult for second language learners to understand the Method section because of the numerous inter-connected information elements found in it, we can envisage the complexity faced by these learners attempting to write the different elements in the section. As part of the effort to unpack the complexity involved, this study uses a genre-based analytical framework to identify the different rhetorical strategies and language mechanisms involved in ‘providing an overview of the research context’, which constitutes a major communicative move that is often confused with other rhetorical segments in experimental research reports in applied linguistics. Aside from the quantitative data showing the extent to which this rhetorical move is deployed, the qualitative analysis of the writers’ textual data and specialist informants’ spoken data has yielded a repertoire of useful communicative functions and language mechanisms that can be systematically presented and explained to second language learners attempting to read and write the Method section of an experimental research report.