A Rhetorical Analysis of Critical Thinking in the “Discussion” Section of Applied Linguistics PhD Dissertations

One of the important sections of PhD dissertations where authors must evaluate and interpret their research findings critically is the dissertation Discussion chapter (DDC). Given the significance of this section and the undeniable role of critical thinking in presenting arguments in DDC, the rhetorical structures of 120 DDCs in applied linguistics from Anglophone and Iranian state universities were compared and analyzed manually employing Crombie’s (1985) taxonomy of interpropositional relations. The findings of the study indicated that, at the semantic level, the three most frequent binary semantic interpropositional relations used by both groups of the study were Reason/Result, Ground/Conclusion, and Simple Comparison, respectively. These findings reveal the high potential of the coherence relations for establishing arguments and thus incorporating critical thinking in DDCs. The study has important implications for postgraduate students to develop a deeper understanding of the rhetorical means used in the DDCs and the necessity to incorporate critical thinking into this chapter.