writer responsibility in social science research articles: move recycling by english vs. native english scholars

One of the requirements for writing english academic texts is the demand for composing reader-friendly texts by providing various kinds of comprehension cues. motivated by the assumption that move recycling (mr) or repetition across sections of social science research articles (ras) is a type of comprehension signal used by writers to facilitate reader comprehension and can be regarded as evidence of the writer’s responsibility, this study sought to investigate any potential differences between english and iranian scholars in mr across ra sections. to this end, 600 empirical ras representing six soft science disciplines, published between 2006 to 2018, 300 of which were authored by english scholars and another 300 by iranian researchers, were chosen. it is worth noting that 24 ras from the iranian corpus were purposefully chosen from those written by iranian ph.d. post-graduate students for later interview. the results of quantitative analysis revealed similarities between the two groups of scholars, with mr appearing more frequently in the discussion section than in other sections, and in economics than in other disciplines. in the first stage of qualitative phase, the two groups of authors' common reasons for mr, including self-promotion, editorial policy, ra length, english academic writing conventions, and reader guidance were determined. however, in the second stage of the qualitative phase, in novice iranian researchers' responses, only two reasons for mr were identified: redundancy and english academic writing conventions, indicating their unawareness of all the rationales behind mr. this implies that eap writing course designers need to provide more explicit teaching materials to guide novice non-english researchers through the justifications underlying established conventions in english academic texts.