A Comparative Study of Introduction and Discussion Sections of Sub-Disciplines of Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Much has been written in the past few decades about the reasons why manyresearch articles (ras) do not find their ways into well-establishedacademic journals. while some doubt viable comparison between bigenglish-language journals (to use swales' 2004 words) or internationaljournals (ijs) and small ones published in other local languages, there isstill a good many reasons to hope for the development of a typology offactors that cause these discrepancies. among some possible factors, one ofthe main reasons,, as yakhontova (1997) notes is the writers' unawarenessof the generic structure of international ras. having this in mind, anddrawing on kanoksilapatham (2007), nwogu (1991), and swales's (1990)models and using top-down and bottom-up analytic procedures, effort wasmade to compare the generic structure of introduction and discussionsections of international and iranian local (il) ras in sub-disciplines ofapplied linguistics. the findings showed no significant differencesregarding the obligatory moves of introduction section across the twocorpora; however, significant differences in the discussion section wererevealed. the obtained results can help both experienced and noviceresearchers in order to report their research findings in a more permissiblestyle. moreover, this study provides researchers with better analytical toolsfor use in academic writing.