research articles

Lexical bundles, recurrent word combinations serving essential discourse functions, have gained prominence in the realm of academic writing. A novel perspective that bridges their functional significance and formulaic nature is promising for uncovering intricate features within these recurring language patterns. Drawing from the structural and functional taxonomy introduced by Biber et al. (1999) and Hyland (2008), this comprehensive study aims to find the existence of any significant difference in the frequency and use of lexical bundles from both structural and functional perspectives between research articles authored by individuals in soft and hard science disciplines. The corpus, rich in academic content, encompasses a total of 954,615 words, featuring 90 research articles in each sub-corpus. The investigation extends beyond mere structural classification to encompass functional analysis, unveiling insightful findings. The findings indicate while structural distinctions between authors in hard and soft sciences appear negligible, substantial variations emerge in the pragmatic deployment of lexical bundles. Authors in soft sciences exhibit a predilection for noun phrases combined with of-phrase fragments. In stark contrast, authors in hard sciences predominantly employ passive verb + prepositional phrase fragments. Additionally, the divergence in the functional classification of lexical bundles is noteworthy. In the realm of soft sciences, authors heavily emphasize the use of framing signals, underscoring the discursive significance of these elements. In contrast, hard science authors gravitate towards transition signals as the most frequently employed function of lexical bundles. These findings carry substantial implications for researchers, highlighting the importance of embracing lexical bundles as a fundamental aspect of scholarly writing within their specific domains.

The instability and interdisciplinarity of applied linguistics have led to the divergence of themes explored in research articles, resulting in many studies on applied linguistics research themes. However, there are still gaps, including selecting unrepresentative corpora and analyzing research articles published years ago. This diachronic corpus-based study attempted to randomly select 3000 original research articles published from 2012 to 2022 in 20 top-tier journals and analyze them using Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) grounded theory to ensure trustworthiness and rigor. The findings demonstrated that well-established areas within the field, such as Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Language Testing, and sociolinguistics, were predominant, whereas critical- and technological-oriented areas received limited attention. Novel interdisciplinary themes, such as neurolinguistics, also emerged. It was also found that each main theme included various sub-themes; for example, SLA embodied sub-themes such as Learner Identity and Learner Motivation, and these sub-themes themselves included sub-categories. The findings illuminate the need for educational policymakers to widen the scope of applied linguistics research. Likewise, in order to cater for the students’ needs and foster a more inclusive educational environment, teachers and materials developers need to incorporate a wide variety of diverse, critical, and neglected themes in their instructional resources, materials, and lesson plans.

Although researchers have analyzed the formal, syntactic, and functional behavior of cleft sentences in the English language across various genres, their distributional frequencies have received very little attention in academic research genres. Therefore, drawing on a 20,389,297-word corpus including 1,521 research articles (RAs), 116 PhD dissertations, and 48 textbooks, in applied linguistics, this study followed Biber et al.’s (1999) and Collins’ (2002) models to identify and analyze four major types of cleft structures in our corpus. Using a corpus-based research design, we drew on concordances to extract the target cleft structures. The computer program AntConc was used to identify instances of cleft sentences, and the statistical significance of the findings was evaluated through separate chi-square tests. The results of frequency analysis showed varying degrees of these grammatical structures across the three research genres, with textbooks including the highest number of clefts, followed by dissertations, and RAs. The results promise pedagogical implications for non-native English student writers to familiarize themselves with conventions in academic research genre writing for publication purposes. The findings suggest that academic research genre writing affects the frequency and use of these complex grammatical structures.

This study examined the use of structures and functions of lexical bundles in scientific research articles written by native English writers and non-native English writers. To this end, three-, four--, and five-word lexical bundles were contrastively investigated in the corpora, which contained 954,615 words. The RAs were then examined structurally by Biber et al. (1999) and functionally by Hyland’s model (2008). Based on the results, native authors used more lexical bundles regarding structural classification than non-native authors. Furthermore, based on the detailed analysis, the authors, no difference in whether they were native or non-native, used noun phrases with of-phrase fragments with high frequency and high rate. Regarding LBs’ functions, the results indicated that the highest concentration of native and non-native corpus is on research-oriented bundles. In general, there was no significant difference in the frequency of using lexical bundles in terms of functional classification between native and non-native researchers of soft science. Regarding LBs’ functions, the highest concentration of native and non-native corpus is on text-oriented bundles.

With the global spread of English as the lingua franca for academic publishing, non-native researchers and university students are constantly facing linguistic barriers including insufficient vocabulary knowledge in writing for publication. This persistent need motivated the development of a good number of corpus-based word lists for frequently used academic and technical words in research articles across disciplines. Nevertheless, despite its importance in corpus-based study of language for word list development, replication research has received far less attention in this line of inquiry. The current study aimed to address this gap and replicated two published studies that investigated the use of academic vocabulary in applied linguistics research articles. To this end, research articles published from 2010 to 2020 in 20 well-known journals in the field were collected, and a corpus with around 48 million words was compiled and analyzed. The findings indicated that academic vocabulary accounted for 11.46% of the corpus, which is similar and close to the reported coverage of the AWL in replicated studies. However, regarding the frequently occurring academic and non-academic content words, the findings showed considerable variation with respect to the results reported earlier. In light of these findings, the study highlighted the importance of replication research to test the reliability of corpus-based vocabulary studies that developed field-specific academic word lists. Finally, the study developed an updated version for applied linguistics academic word list, that might be regarded as a resource and guide for the vocabulary learning component of the relevant EAP programs in the field.

The interaction between the writers and the experts while using citations is one of the main features of academic texts. For the integration of external experts into the text, writers usually use reporting verbs, which seem to function differently. Furthermore, selecting reporting verbs (RVs) by the researchers of disciplines seems to vary. This paper explored the functions of RVs across sciences. To this end, 200 “Results and Discussion” section of RAs from the four sciences, namely Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the data, and their functions of RVs were analyzed based on Hyland’s framework (2002). Hyland (2002) considered three basic RV types based on their function, including research, cognitive, and discourse acts, subsequently dividing each category into several subcategories. The results showed that the writers in Life Sciences used more research acts in comparison to the other disciplines. In terms of cognition acts, the rates of tentative verbs were high in all sciences since the researchers tried to report the results with caution as they were uncertain about the findings. The results approved this claim, indicating the high frequency of tentative verbs under the category of discourse acts, across disciplines using verbs like hypothesize, indicate, and suggest to show doubt with different rates. The obtained results can guide novice writers of the above-mentioned four disciplines to advance an authorial perspective and adjust to the expert conventions of the relevant research areas.

Academic writing, and specifically writing research articles, is regarded as an important type of discourse which is challenging for EFL learners owing to its nature and constraints. Metadiscourse is an important element of writing in an academic context, and with the growth of corpus-based studies, research interest in the prominence of academic discourse has been enhanced. Metadiscourse resources can contribute to the writer's effort to organize the text, and assist the readers in their comprehension. The present study is an attempt to explore research article discussion sections written by nonnative researchers with regard to metadiscourse markers. To this end, 40 research article discussions written by nonnative writers from humanities were selected and analyzed to reveal the number and types of metadiscourse resources and rhetorical techniques the writers used in producing these texts. In the current study, the authors deployed Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse Model as the analytical framework to analyze the data. The findings indicate that the writers have a preference to avail ofinteractive metadiscourse markers two times more than the interactional subcategories. The findings of this study can be said to imply that nonnative writers are expected to get exposed to adequate training on the use of metadiscourse resources. Furthermore, teachers are advised to train their learners on the use of such resources through raising their awareness of using these rhetorical devices effectively, especially in the EFL context.

Complexity measures in academic writing have experienced a shift from clausal to phrasal indices in recent years. Drawing on a subset of Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development, we explored phrasal complexity across sections (part-genres) of research articles (RAs) in applied linguistics and clinical medicine. A 389,332-word corpus consisting of 80 randomly selected RAs from leading journals in applied linguistics and clinical medicine was compiled for the purposes of the present study.  One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t-test, as implemented in SPSS (version 25), were employed to find differences across the RA sections and between two groups of academic writers. The findings indicated that RAs in clinical medicine relied more heavily on noun phrase modifiers in all sections than those in applied linguistics, suggesting that the distributional pattern of these linguistic expressions is discipline-independent. The implications of the distributional pattern of phrasal complexity are discussed in relation to L2 writing pedagogy and the development of genre-based, discipline-specific academic writing.

This study aimed to investigate the grammatical complexity based on Biber, Gray, Staples, and Egbert’s (2020) linguistic description in research articles published in Iranian local journals and international journals. The corpus of the study included 40 Applied Linguistics research articles, 20 published in Iranian local journals and 20 in international journals in 2019-2020. The research articles were selected through purposive sampling from two Iranian journals, namely Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics and Journal of Teaching Language Skills, and two international journals, including Journal of English for Specific Purposes and System Journal. The research articles were analyzed in terms of three dimensions of grammatical complexity, including the structural types, syntactic functions, and specific structural/syntactic features. Moreover, for intra-rater consistency, the researcher re-analyzed the corpus after one month to see whether the same results were found. According to the results, in terms of the first dimension, i.e., the structural types, the frequencies of structures indicating higher grammatical complexity (non-finite dependent clauses and dependent phrases) outnumbered the frequency of structures showing lower grammatical complexity (finite dependent clauses) in both local and international journals. Concerning the second dimension, i.e., syntactic function within the structural type, the frequencies of more complex syntactic functions were higher than those of simple functions in both sets of research articles. Concerning the third dimension, i.e., specific structural/syntactic features, both groups of writers preferred to use more complex specific structural/syntactic features than simple ones.

Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this study analyzed two different sub-corpora including Non-Native English-Speaking (NNES) and Native English-Speaking (NES) sub-corpus. There were 60 research articles from soft sciences including Applied Linguistics, Sociology, Economics and hard sciences including Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Biology. To examine the frequency of stance and engagement markers in the two sub-corpora separately, MAXQDA software was utilized. Several Chi-square tests were run to investigate the differences found in the frequencies of the two groups. The results demonstrated that writers of different fields of study and from different cultural backgrounds exerted varying degrees of authorship and interaction in their texts. Regarding disciplinary variation, it was found that the researchers in soft disciplines used more stance and engagement markers than the ones in hard disciplines. With regard to cross-cultural variation, native academic writers preferred to draw more on interactional markers than non-native Iranian academic writers. The findings of the present study offer implications to academic writers from different fields of study and different cultural backgrounds so that they become cognizant of their own presence in texts and their interaction with readers based on the use of stance and engagement markers. The results can also be implemented in EAP/ESP courses and syllabi.

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles (LBs) in research articles authored by English L1 and Persian L1 academic writers, with a special focus on the syntactic roles of LBs in a larger context of sentence level. Four-word bundles were retrieved and classified structurally. The use of identified LBs was compared in two writer groups. The syntactic roles and relative complexity of the bundles’ structures were analyzed in relation to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development. The results indicated different patterns of reliance on LBs, with Persian writers making greater use of LBs at higher frequency. In addition, Persian academic writers tended to use high frequency bundles differently from native-speaker academic writers. The results of the syntactic analysis of LBs reflected more frequent use of LBs functioning as compressing lexico-grammatical structures in a native English-speaker corpus, which is indicative of a more complex academic register compared to that of a Persian L1 corpus. The pedagogical implications of the findings for the explicit instruction of syntactically complex corpus-driven LBs for discipline-specific genre writing and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This paper reports the results of a corpus-driven study that investigated the structural frequency and diversity of lexical bundles in chemistry research articles. The investigation was based on a corpus of 1,185 chemistry research articles, totaling four million words. WordSmith was used to generate four-word lexical bundles and their concordance lines. Altogether, 223 lexical bundles were found. More than 55% of these bundles were phrasal; 35% of them were clausal. ‘Prepositional phrases + of’ bundles were the most frequently used bundles. Bundles with a passive verb, followed by a prepositional phrase fragment were the second most frequent bundles in the entire corpus. Bundles with the structure ‘noun phrase + of’ were the third and second most frequent bundles in the corpus and among phrasal bundles, respectively. In terms of diversity, bundles with ‘noun phrase + of’ and ‘passive + prepositional phrase fragment’ were the most varied and bundles with ‘pronoun/noun phrase + be’ structure were the least varied bundles in the entire corpus. Prepositional phrase bundles outnumbered noun phrase bundles in terms of frequency, whereas noun phrase bundles outnumbered prepositional phrase bundles in diversity. Altogether, the results show that frequency and diversity correlate with the type of phrasal lexical bundle. Moreover, the study suggests that different discourses are associated with different sets of lexical bundles with different frequency and diversity, due to the different communicative functions they follow. The paper ends with implications for future EAP research, materials development, and pedagogy.

Metadiscourse involves the self-reflective linguistic expressions that refer to the evolving text, the writer, and the imagined readers of that text. This study utilized an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine the authors' use of metadiscourse in the Abstract sections of Applied Linguistics Research Articles (RAs). It investigated the distributions of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers at a corpus of 110 RAs published by celebrity and non-celebrity authors to determine the ways academic writers deploy these resources at a hight-stake research genre to persuade readers in their discourse community. The findings revealed that frame markers with a relative frequency of 112 were the most frequent strategy category for the non-celebrity authors. Moreover, evidentials with a relative frequency of 3 were the least frequently used strategy for the celebrity authors. There were no significant differences in the use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers between celebrity and non-celebrity authors. These findings might have implications for the teaching of academic writing and scholarly publishing and for novice writers who aim to publish their studies in academic journals.

Stated key words after the abstract section in research articles are among those lines of inquiry which have received less attention in Applied Linguists (AL) studies. In this paper, the researcher explored the distribution of stated key terms and expressions as used by 73 researchers in AL domains in both local (NOORMAGZ) and global database publishers (SAGE, ELEVIRE, SINCENCE DIRECT) Those Scimago journal lists, which were abstracted in Thomson Reuters Web of Science [WoS] journals were precisely screened in terms of their compatibility with title vs. topic match index as well as their position in the research articles throughout the whole sampled research papers including Introduction, Review of Literature, Method, Results & Discussion (IRMRD) to explore authors’ tendencies towards art-based utilization of key word selection/assignment for research writing aims. The results over title-topic match indicated that at least one or two stated key words significantly appeared in the title of research paper within both local and global databases with the higher preference for keyword-title match among Iranian researchers. Regarding the most probable positions in the sampled research articles, gained data in this research could not significantly show any differences between local and global researchers. Possible implications were discussed in the light of critical, art-based approaches for key word elaboration/explanation in English Language Teaching (ELT) and AL research.

Importance of discipline specific vocabulary knowledge is well perceived. Despite the importance of the issue, there is a dearth of empirical research to unravel frequent academic vocabulary in the field of Health Information Management. To fill this research gap, the present study drew on a corpus of research articles and course books written in this field to underscore the concept of Academic Word List. To do so, a corpus of 2,264,981 running words analyzed by Range software package. In the process of research, we proposed a new discipline specific word list specially tailored for the students of health information management which can cover for 15.09% of all tokens in the corpus. This proportion of coverage is an improvement over previous academic word lists. Accordingly, it is hoped that the findings of the present study could contribute to students, teachers, material developers and researchers in this field of study.