Understanding the Rhetorical Structure of Experimental Aerospace Engineering Research Articles

Rhetorical Moves in Research Article Discussions: Does the Quartile Value of a Journal Matter?

Journal rankings are assumed to represent the quality of a publication, and research articles published in differently ranked journals are therefore expected to display different rhetorical patterns in their discussion sections. However, studies investigating the rhetorical patterns of discussion sections in research articles published in journals across different quartiles remain limited. This study was conducted to determine whether the journal quartile values influence the rhetorical moves and rhetorical patterns in the discussion sections of research articles on ELT. A mixed-methods approach using content analysis, following Drisko and Maschi (2016), was applied in this research. The data were selected from 80 discussion sections of research articles on ELT that followed the IMRD pattern and were published in internationally reputable journals across different quartiles, based on the SCImago database of 2023. The rhetorical moves in each discussion section were identified and coded following Peacock’s rhetorical move framework (2002). Quantitative analysis was conducted to determine the frequency of rhetorical move occurrences across different quartiles of journals and to identify the rhetorical pattern commonly found in each classification. The results reveal that higher-quartile journals use more complete rhetorical moves, while the lower-quartile journals tend to apply limited rhetorical moves. Consequently, this result leads to different patterns of rhetorical moves commonly found in the discussion sections of research articles published in journals across different quartiles. It is concluded that the quartile values of journals affect the use of rhetorical moves and lead to the development of common discussion-section patterns across different journal quartiles, which also contribute to well-structured research articles. The results have implications for academic writing courses, especially regarding current trends in the rhetorical structure of the discussion section of research articles based on the quartile value of the journals.

Rhetorical Structure of an Occluded Academic Genre: A Corpus-Based Move Analysis of Teaching Philosophy Statements

Teaching philosophy statements (TPSs) are high-stakes promotional documents required for academic hiring, tenure, and promotion in higher education worldwide. Despite their gatekeeping function in professional academic discourse, TPSs remain an underexamined occluded genre: prescriptive writing guides offer general advice, but few empirical studies have described the rhetorical structure of authentic statements. This study addresses this gap by investigating the move-step structure and lexicogrammatical features of TPSs from an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective. A specialized corpus of 46 authentic TPSs written by faculty members and graduate students from North American universities (2004-2016) was compiled and analysed using corpus-based genre analysis. Functional moves were coded in MAXQDA with an inter-rater reliability of 94.9%, and keywords and three-word n-grams for each conventional move were extracted with AntConc. The analysis identified fourteen moves across three categories (teacher-focused, classroom-focused, and teaching/evaluation process), of which five were conventional. The most frequent and cyclical move was focus on teaching practices (100%), indicating that concrete classroom examples outweigh abstract philosophical declarations. The genre proved hybrid and flexible, with no fixed move order, combining features of academic prose (prepositional-phrase n-grams) and promotional genres such as CVs and application letters. Substantial variation emerged between faculty and graduate-statement corpora: faculty privileged philosophical concepts and mentorship, while graduate students foregrounded concrete activities, technology use, and diversity. A systematic comparison with twelve prescriptive writing guides revealed partial alignment but also several moves – such as acknowledging mentors and addressing students’ difficulties – that occur in authentic texts but are absent from the guides. The study contributes a genre model grounded in authentic data, offers empirically derived lexicogrammatical resources for novice writers, and provides pedagogical implications for teacher training and ESP instruction in academic genres.

Rhetorical Moves in Research Article Abstracts in the Education Discipline across Accreditation: Does Sinta Accreditation Matter?

Although research article abstracts in Indonesian journals have received many scholarly attention, studies in this area have limited focus on education discipline, more particularly comparing those in different Sinta accreditation status. By understanding this gap, this study intends to investigate whether across Sinta accreditation status influence their rhetorical moves in three groups of data: group A (Sinta 1 and Sinta 2), group B (Sinta 3 and Sinta 4), and group C (Sinta 5 and Sinta 6). Data in this study were 30 abstracts, taken 10 research article abstracts from each group. The analysis used genre analytical approach and reporting the results qualitatively. The results showed more similarities and fewer differences between groups. Four of the five rhetorical moves occurred consistently across all accreditation levels, whereas only Move 1 (Situating the Research) showed substantial variation, appearing in 70% of Sinta 1–4 but only 10% of Sinta 5–6 abstracts. These findings may contribute to extend earlier genre studies in research article abstracts in Indonesian context and contribute more understanding for novice authors for writing practices. Besides, the findings can draw implication for training research abstract writings.

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research SMU

Language Proficiency and moves in Turkish and English Research Abstracts

The primary function of the abstract within a research article is to convince readers of the study's significance, encapsulating specific details such as its purpose, methodology, results, and discussions and/or conclusions. Notably, scholarly attention has been directed towards the rhetorical structures employed in abstracts found in scientific journals, as authors are believed to employ diverse structures to present their articles in an engaging manner that captures readers' interest. The varied rhetorical structures used in research article abstracts are often referred to as ``moves''. This study investigated the impact of language proficiency and translation on these moves. Six Ph.D. students from the Department of Turkish Language and Literature of a state university in Turkey were tasked with composing abstracts for four published articles in a social science journal in Turkish. A month later, they were requested to write abstracts for the same articles in English. Subsequent analysis compared both sets of abstracts in terms of the moves they incorporated. It was observed that the introduction, purpose, result, and conclusion sections were present in abstracts written in both languages. However, notably, the method section was absent from abstracts in both Turkish and English. Additionally, it was found that the introduction section tended to be the longest in the abstracts regardless of the language, despite no statistically significant difference in the word count between the Turkish and English versions. The findings suggested that the differences were discipline, language proficiency, and writing conventions related.

Bridging Macro-Rhetorical Moves and Micro-Cohesive Devices in Academic Discourse: A Critical Review of English-Vietnamese Contrastive Rhetoric

Abstract. Driven by institutional pressures on second-language scholars to publish in internationally indexed journals, this systematic review evaluates two decades (2006–2026) of empirical literature on research article introductions in the English-Vietnamese context to address the persistent divide between macro-structural and micro-linguistic analytical traditions. Guided by an adapted PRISMA 2020 protocol, 45 empirical studies retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar were systematically selected and synthesized through qualitative thematic coding and descriptive content analysis. The synthesis demonstrates that existing literature has largely evolved along two parallel trajectories comprising macro-level move analyses (22 studies) and micro-level cohesion investigations (17 studies) with only six studies examining their interaction. While genre based research shows that Vietnamese authors frequently favor indirect niche establishment strategies in Move 2, cohesion focused studies report distinct tendencies in conjunction deployment and thematic progression, thereby uncovering three major gaps including the methodological separation between structural and textual analysis, the lack of move specific functional accounts of cohesive ties, and the limited integration of linguistic typology with discourse practices. To bridge these gaps, this review proposes an integrated conceptual framework that treats communicative functions as the functional context for lexicogrammatical choices, offering a unified model for future contrastive research and establishing pedagogical directions for academic writing instruction.