Analyzing research article introductions by Iranian and native English-speaking authors of Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Considering the role of academic writing in the dissemination of research findings among<br><br> members of scientific communities, efforts have been made by language specialists to achieve<br><br> a more detailed understanding of this register, with hopes that the derived features could then<br><br> be used to teach researchers, writing in a second/foreign language, to more effectively<br><br> communicate the results of their studies. This study sets out to achieve a similar goal through<br><br> the analysis of research article introductions in terms of the frequency and function of their<br><br> lexical bundles. To this end, a corpus of 200 research article introductions by published<br><br> authors in the field of Applied Linguistics was compared to a similar corpus by Iranian,<br><br> non-native writers of the same field. The findings reveal that Iranian authors use more 4-word<br><br> lexical bundles in their writing compared to their native-speaker counterparts. Syntactic and<br><br> functional differences between the two corpora are introduced and implications for academic<br><br> writing instructors are discussed in detail.