A Genre Analysis of Research Article Discussions in Applied Linguistics*

This study adopts Peacock’s (2002) revised model of move analysis to address questions related to the rhetorical structure of research article discussions and intra-disciplinary variations within the field of applied linguistics. Data were compiled from a corpus of 50 research articles published in five major peer-reviewed journals in applied linguistics. The results indicated that Moves 2 (Finding) and 4 (Reference to pre-vious research) were obligatory; Moves 1 (Information move), 5 (Expla-nation for expected or unexpected results), 6 (Claim) and 8 (Recom-mendation) were conventional whereas Moves 3 (Expected or expected outcome) and 7 (Limitation) were optional. The four most common moves included Moves 1, 2, 4, and 5 whereas the least common move was Move 7. The results also suggest some intra-disciplinary differences in terms of the number and type of moves and move cycles in Studies in Second Language Acquisition. This study’s findings will benefit teachers, graduate students, and less-experienced research writers in teaching and writing RA discussions that meet the expectation of their research discourse community