Analyzing research article introductions by Iranian and native English-speaking authors of Applied Linguistics

Considering the role of academic writing in the dissemination of research findings among members of scientific communities, efforts have been made by language specialists to achieve a more detailed understanding of this register, with hopes that the derived features could then be used to teach researchers, writing in a second/foreign language, to more effectively communicate their results of their studies. This study sets out to achieve a similar goal through the analysis of research article introductions in terms of the frequency and function of their lexical bundles. To this end, a corpus of 200 research article introductions by published authors in the field of Applied Linguistics was compared to a similar corpus by Iranian, non-native writers of the same field. The findings reveal that Iranian authors use more 4-word lexical bundles in their writing compared to their native-speaker counterparts. Syntactic and functional differences between the two corpora are introduced and implications for academic writing instructors are discussed in detail. Adapted from the source document