an awareness of formulaic clusters in conclusion moves of applied linguistics research articles

Writing academic research article is one of the most important endeavors through which the writer can contribute his own knowledge and create a voice among the members of disciplinary community. exploring the linguistic features which are used to identify the rhetorical structures of academic research articles is of value to have a clearer view of this widely practiced genre. the present research investigates the use of formulaic clusters as a type of linguistic feature in writing research article conclusions by non-native writers. a corpus of 200 research article conclusions written by iranian l2 users in the field of applied linguistics was compiled and the most frequent four-word formulaic clusters were identified and categorized structurally in the corpus. then, the identified bundles were classified based on the communicative purpose they serve in each move and step of the conclusions following yang and allison’s (2003) move organization of research article conclusions. findings demonstrated that l2 writers relied heavily on the use of specific formulaic bundles to perform the communicative functions associated with the moves and steps. the largest number of clusters was used to show move 1, summarizing the study and the least bundles occurred in move 2, evaluating the study.