A Genre-Based Analysis of the Moves and Steps in the Discussion Section of Psychology Research Articles between English Writers and Iranian Writers

Nonnative English speaking (NNES) writers seeking to publish the results of their studies in international English-medium journals may find it challenging because of unfamiliarity with the genre conventions of research articles (RAs). The goal of the present study was twofold: (a) to identify the moves and steps characterizing the discussion section of RAs and (b) to investigate the differences in the use of moves and steps employed by English Writers (EWs) and Iranian Writers (IWs). To these ends, an English Corpus (EC) composed of 50 RAs written by EWs, and an Iranian Corpus (IC), including 50 RAs written by IWs were developed. Drawing on Swales’ moves analysis, this genre-based study used corpus data for genre analysis. The data were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. A series of one-way chi-square procedures was used to analyze the frequency data quantitatively. For qualitative analysis, corpus data were content analyzed to identify moves and steps. A list of moves and steps, including six moves and 10 steps of the discussion section of RAs was proposed based on the analysis of 100 English RAs representing five core subfields. The results showed statistically significant differences in using one of the moves and several steps between EWs and IWs. Unlike EWs, IWs mostly failed to use all steps to linguistically textualize and manifest the overall function of a particular move. The study concludes with some implications for English for specific purposes (ESP) practitioners.