Research articles in applied linguistics and educational technology : a corpus-based study of rhetorical moves and authorial stance

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