Explaining Causality in ELT Research Articles Published in Iranian Local and International Journals

Academic phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It makes explicit the more common phraseological ‘nuts and bolts’ of academic writing. One of academic phrasebanks is developed by the University of Manchester. A section in this academic phrasebank is devoted to “Explaining Causality”. Thus, this study intends to see how ELT writers explain causality in research articles published in international and Iranian local journals. To meet this end, 100 research articles (50 research articles from the international journal of “ELT” published by Oxford University Press and 50 research articles from “Journal of Teaching Language Skills” published by Shiraz University Press) were selected. The research articles were analyzed for the linguistic features or structures suggested by the academic phrasebank for the sake of explaining causality. The results suggested that ELT writers of research articles use some of the suggested linguistic features and structures to explain causality in their research articles. The results also suggested that there are some variations in the frequencies of the used linguistic features and structures across two groups of research articles. The results of this study could act as a guide for ELT research articles’ writers in using such linguistic features and structures to explain causality in research articles.