Investigating Move Structure and Textual Features of native and non-native English Applied Linguistics Research Article Discussions Published in International Journals

Within second language writing realm, the important role of genre has been emphasized for at least two decades. The main purpose of this analysis was to identify the move/step structure and textual features of Discussion part of Applied linguistics research articles. Two raters analysed 60 RA Discussions (30 from non-natives and 30 from natives) by incorporating Yang and Allison (2003) model for genre analysis and by adapted model from Hinkel (2003) for textual feature analysis. The findings demonstrated quantitative differences between moves 2 (reporting results) ,4(commenting results), 5( summary of the findings), and 6( evaluating the study) utilized in the two groups. These findings might be due to non-natives' preference for rhetorical concepts and values in their local writing community about genre structure of Discussions in Applied Linguistics RAs. The results also revealed that non-native writers use more numerative, resultative nouns, past tense, passive, modals, frequency adverbs, adverb and adjective clause, exemplar, and hedging. The results may promise some implications for syllabus design, ESP pedagogy, and materials preparation.