Connecting metadiscoursal features and rhetorical moves in research article introductions

What is it about?

Research on academic writing has devoted much of its attention to the emergent genre of the research article, a growing area that has generated great interest over the last few decades. Being a high-stakes genre, the research article has a specific rhetorical structure that guides writers how to construct their discourse followed by socio-rhetorical norms generally practiced in discipline. The genre of the research article has been studied for its overall structure, historical evolution, social construction, as well as the rhetorical structure of the different constituent sections. This study takes a pragmatic approach to explore the rhetorical structure and metadiscoursal features of research article introductions in a comparable corpus of 40 introductions from applied linguistics and chemistry. Specifically, this article reports on a rhetorical analysis of introduction moves and an identification of metadiscourse markers and discourse functions they were conveying and focuses on the mapping of the markers most pervasively used to signal the moves. Results showed disciplinary differences regarding both move structure and metadiscourse use which could be attributed to the susceptibility of rhetorical practices and preferences to sociorhetorical conventions in each community.

Featured Image

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In addition to their contribution to the broadening of current investigation into the genre of the research article, the findings of this study will help i) confirm whether the CARS (Create a Research Space) model can account for the structure of the research article introductions examined and the extent to which they conform to the strict chronological CARS move order; and ii) uncover metadiscoursal practices in applied linguistics and the relatively unexplored discipline of chemistry, considering that the utilization of metadiscoursal features constitutes an intricate aspect that writers are required to master if they wish to gain acceptance and credence from the community of which they are a member.