Moves in discussions: A corpus-based genre analysis of the discussion sections in applied linguistics research articles written in English

The present study investigated the genre-specific features, namely rhetorical structure and move-bound formulaic lexico-grammatical patterns, of research article discussions written in English within the fields of Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching (ELT). A 66,272-word specialized corpus was compiled from the discussion and conclusion sections of 36 qualitative and quantitative articles published in reputable journals. For the rhetorical investigation, Yang and Allison's structural model was used as the initial coding framework to identify communicative purposes in 2,182 sentences. The sentence-based move analysis, however, revealed that some communicative meanings are unspecified in this coding scheme, which led to the development of a more comprehensive rhetorical framework with 25 functional categories at three levels (move-step-substep). The study revealed obligatory, conventional, and optional nature of these functional categories, and the similarities and differences between the quantitative and qualitative articles both in terms of their frequency of occurrences and cyclical move-step patterns. Once the moves were identified, the grammatical patterns were analyzed after finding key bundles in each move. Due to the small size of the data representing each move, the formulaic bundles were identified by their part-of-speech (PoS) categories. The findings provided corpus-based evidence for the existence of formulaic bundles based on four and five PoS tag sequences in each move. Structurally, these bundles were grammatically incomplete units involving a verb phrase, prepositional phrases, and noun phrases. The findings of the study contribute to our understanding of the writing norms of discussion sections and the development of materials that can be used in the teaching of moves, which may provide higher education students and academics with power in academic discourse and recognition by the Applied Linguistics and ELT community. Key Words: Kurmancî, Sub-dialect, Area of Filistan, Phonology, Phonetic