| Summary: | There has been a surging interest in the study of genre-based analysis of the research
article (RA) since three decades ago. Over these years, English for Academic Purposes
(EAP) writing research has highlighted the intricacy and evolving nature of discursive
practices by underlining writers’ communicative goals and linguistic choices, in addition
to the expectations of discourse community members. Some practitioners, typically
novice writers, are unaware of the critical role that rhetorical structure and linguistic
features serve in creating a research article (RA) acceptable to the respective discourse
communities. Therefore, it seems essential to perform analysis at both macro (rhetorical
structure) and micro levels (linguistic features) as it provides useful information crucial
to prepare apt pedagogical materials for novice writers to compose comprehensive
research articles. Genre descriptions of research articles vary in their focus from the
selected sections to the whole article. Very limited studies have investigated the overall
organisational structure of articles with all the main sections of Introductions-Methods-Results-Discussion (IMRD). The current study set out to a) analyse the rhetorical
structure of IMRD sections of forestry research articles, b) analyse the cyclical move
patterns recurring in each IMRD section and c) examine stance markers realised in each
move in the respective sections. Mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative were
applied in this study. A corpus of 40 research articles from 5 ISI journals was selected
for this study. The selected articles were extracted from high impact factor journals in
forestry. The corpus was analysed based on Kanoksilapatham’s (2005) model as the
analytical tool to explore the rhetorical structure and cyclical patterns of IMRD sections.
As to the linguistic features, this thesis applied Hyland’ (2005) interactional model of
metadiscourse to study stance markers of moves in the overall IMRD sections. On the
basis of results from the analysis of rhetorical structure of RAs, some new moves and
steps were realised in each respective section, owing to the specilised nature of forestry
discipline, as an applied hard science. In this regard, the highest number of new moves
or steps was registered in Introductions, with the Results sections remaining unchanged.
As to the cyclical patterns, the findings pointed to the pervasiveness of particular
function-oriented cycles and sequences in each IMRD section. In Introductions, the Move1-Move2 cycle, in Methods the Move 4-Move 5, in Results the Move 11-Move 12,
and in Discussions the Move 13-Move 14 cycles were the most frequent cyclical patterns.
Exploring stance markers, each move was found to be characterised with particular
epistemological stance markers in cases attributable to the nature of forestry discipline
and the communicative purpose of each move. Overall, hedging devices and self-mentions were found to be the most prototypical stance markers, with boosters and
attitude markers as the least indexed ones in the corpus. To conclude, findings from the
present study further testify to the integral role of RAs genre knowledge in EAP realm.
Raising novice writers’ awareness of the prototypical principles behind rhetorical
structure and linguistic features of RAs in a specific discipline could be considered the
main potential pedagogical benefit of genre analysis approach.
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