enhancing geology students' consciousness on academic articles rhetorical structures through a computer assisted language learning (call) program

Among the main traditions in genre studies esp genre analysis has been widely used for the development of esp materials utilizing move analysis. some writing systems and tutorials have also been developed to provide assistance to academics and researchers for their publications. however, none of these programs have been developed for geology academic journal writing. accordingly, the present study aimed to investigate the design, development and usefulness of an esp academic writing software based on esp genre analysis to teach and assist journal writing to geology academics. following a hybrid method which was a combination of a mixed method design and design-based research a three-phase study was conducted. the triangulation study on 102 geology academics showed that the geology postgraduate students require awareness-raising on their esp academic writing requirements; namely, geology research articles’ schematic structure and the use of metadiscourse markers in academic journal writing. the findings from the qualitative data analysis of 220 geology research articles from 73 high impact geology journals revealed distinctive differences in the rhetorical structures and the use of metadiscourse markers in research articles of the six main geology sub-disciplines. based on the findings of the first phase a computer web-based application was developed. the effectiveness of esp writing application was examined through in-class and autonomous interventions on 104 geology postgraduate students. the kruskal wallis test results indicated that the program was more successful in raising the students’ awareness on their sub-disciplinary research articles’ rhetorical organizations through in-class instruction. however, the call software proved to be more effective on raising students’ consciousness on the use of metadiscourse markers through autonomous learning.