An investigation of the structure of discussion sections in research articles written by native English and Turkish researchers in the field of applied linguistics

The present study aims to investigate the similarities and differences of rhetorical organization of research article discussions written by international writers and Turkish authors writing in English and Turkish in the field of Applied Linguistics. The study examined the rhetorical organization of research article discussions and the frequencies of moves and steps which were utilized in these sections. The corpus used in the present study included 45 research article discussions in total. Fifteen articles written by international group, 15 articles written by Turkish authors writing in English and 15 articles written by Turkish authors writing in Turkish were selected for a balanced corpus. RA discussions were analysed using the models by Yang & Allison (2003) and Baştürkmen (2012). After the pilot study, the model needed some modifications and addition for the present study. Discussions in 45 research articles were coded by using MaxQDA 11. The findings revealed that there were some similarities and differences between international writers and Turkish authors writing in English and Turkish. Also, there were some similarities and differences between Turkish authors writing in English and Turkish. Turkish authors writing in English. Identifying the most frequent moves and steps, the commonly used move patterns and obligatory and optional moves and steps may help novice authors and researchers in the academic writing process.