سید فؤاد ابراهیمی

This study focuses on realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers in the writing of research article abstracts from four disciplines. To this end, 120 research article abstracts from four disciplines namely, Applied Linguistics, Economics, Agriculture, and Applied Physics (30 from each discipline) were selected. All research article abstracts were extracted from empirical research articles published in international high impact journals. The corpus was analyzed adopting Gosden (1992) taxonomy. The most striking result is that the realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers, to a large extent, are guided by the nature of research article and discipline. This result adds substantially to the comparative understanding of research article writing across disciplines and evidences the need to tailor writing according to English for specific needs.

Frequencies and discourse functions of grammatical subject types were investigated in a corpus of forty results and discussion sections selected from four disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering). The results and discussion sections were selected from research articles that were published in 2008-2012 issues of prestigious high journals of the four disciplines. The results and discussion sections were analyzed for realizations and discourse functions of grammatical subject types adopting the taxonomy suggested by Ebrahimi (2014). The results suggested that the selections, frequencies and discourse functions of grammatical subject types were highly imposed by the macro functions of the results and discussion sections and the conventional rules of writing in the disciplines. One immediate implication for the outcome of this study is that writers and instructors need to keep in mind that they must be fully aware (and follow suit) of how the implementation of grammatical subjects are imposed and restricted by disciplinary conventions.

Digital communication technologies could play a pivotal role in the realm of learning, entertainment, and education for children, and could significantly affect the nature of commercial relations with children. The use of media as new communication technologies for children over the past decade has hosted many researches. The present study aimed to determine the effect of advertising literacy education on 6th-grade primary school female students' critical thinking skills in facing the media commercial messages in the city of Dezful in 2019-2020. The population consisted of all the 6th-grade primary school students in the city of Tehran, of which 60 students were selected using the random clustering method and randomly assigned into two groups of experiment and control. The tool used in this study was Cornell Critical Thinking Test (CCTT), and analysis of covariance was used to analyze the data. The results showed that advertising literacy affected students' critical thinking. The effects on students' inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and observational analysis of advertising messages, credibility, and hypothesizing power were found significant.

This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. The corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The findings showed that in both groups of introductions, the common tenses were the present and past, rather than future. In introductions published in the international journal, the present tense was used more often than in those published in the Iranian journal, whereas past tense was used twice as frequently in Iranian journal introductions. Regarding the aspect of verbs, the simple aspect was common in both groups of introductions, but more frequent in Iranian journal introductions. The perfect aspect was more common in international journal introductions. Concerning voice, the active voice was predominant in both groups of introductions. Semantically, verbs with mental, activity, communication and existence meanings were common in both groups. The semantic meanings of verbs were not significantly different in the two groups of introductions. The findings of this study can have implications for novice, non-native writers in Applied Linguistics in helping them design and write more appropriate research article introductions.

There are two different trends for the study of metadiscourse, including interactive and reflexive. The reflexive model suggested by (Mauranen, 1993) and (Ädel, 2010) cares about reflexivity in language. As reflexivity plays a pivotal role in spoken genres, this study aimed to study the frequency and functions of reflexive metadiscourse markers in academic interviews. Hence, this study focused on a corpus of three academic interviews carried out in English native academic context that was taken from “The Michigan Corpus of Academe Spoken English” (MICASE). The corpus was analyzed using the model by Ädel that includes four functional categories of metalinguistic comments, discourse organization, speech act labels, and references to the audiences . The results showed that about one-quarter of the personal pronouns were metadiscourse. Besides, among the personal pronouns that perform metadiscourse function, singular first-person pronoun was the most frequent while plural first-person pronoun was very rare. It was also found that among the four functions, the interviewees and interviewers paid more attention to metalinguistic comments and references to the audience . The results of this study could add to the knowledge of those participating in interviews in general and in the academic context in particular.

This study aimed to investigate the grammatical complexity based on Biber, Gray, Staples, and Egbert’s (2020) linguistic description in research articles published in Iranian local journals and international journals. The corpus of the study included 40 Applied Linguistics research articles, 20 published in Iranian local journals and 20 in international journals in 2019-2020. The research articles were selected through purposive sampling from two Iranian journals, namely Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics and Journal of Teaching Language Skills, and two international journals, including Journal of English for Specific Purposes and System Journal. The research articles were analyzed in terms of three dimensions of grammatical complexity, including the structural types, syntactic functions, and specific structural/syntactic features. Moreover, for intra-rater consistency, the researcher re-analyzed the corpus after one month to see whether the same results were found. According to the results, in terms of the first dimension, i.e., the structural types, the frequencies of structures indicating higher grammatical complexity (non-finite dependent clauses and dependent phrases) outnumbered the frequency of structures showing lower grammatical complexity (finite dependent clauses) in both local and international journals. Concerning the second dimension, i.e., syntactic function within the structural type, the frequencies of more complex syntactic functions were higher than those of simple functions in both sets of research articles. Concerning the third dimension, i.e., specific structural/syntactic features, both groups of writers preferred to use more complex specific structural/syntactic features than simple ones.

The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs. The corpus consisted of 50 PhD thesis abstracts written on the subject of Applied Linguistics. All of the abstracts were written from 2010 to 2014. The theses from which the abstracts were extracted are available in the ProQuest database. Based on the model put forth by Swales and Feak (2004), the elements of the abstracts were identified. In accordance with Ebrahimi (2014), frameworks were used to analyse discourse functions, while the realisation of grammatical subjects and verbs was analysed for tense types. The results revealed that the “introducing part of study” and “research-related objects” were the predominant types of grammatical subjects. Indeed, these performed more discourse functions in Applied Linguistics PhD thesis abstracts compared with other grammatical subject types. The results also indicated that simple past tense was predominant in aim, method, and results sections, while the simple present was predominant in the background and conclusion sections.

Hedging and boosting are significant communicative resources to construe and attain persuasion in different fields and particular genres of academic writing. Hedges allow the researcher to address possible problems, raise objections or anticipate opposition to the research claims while contributing something new to the ongoing dialogue in a research field. Boosters enormously help to achieve the essential writers’ need to convince their readership of the truth in their propositions. They are mainly used whenever writers consider it not too risky to include them in their propositions. This study aims to investigate the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters in academic students' essays. To meet this end, 96 students' essays (a total of 269.428 words) were selected from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), including English and Psychology disciplines. The corpus was analyzed based on Abdollahzadeh (2019)classification of hedges. The results showed that hedges and boosters were frequent enough to be considered in teaching writing, either reducing or increasing the force of written utterances. The results of this study could be used directly in the syllabus designed for academic essay writing.

The interaction between the writers and the experts while using citations is one of the main features of academic texts. For the integration of external experts into the text, writers usually use reporting verbs, which seem to function differently. Furthermore, selecting reporting verbs (RVs) by the researchers of disciplines seems to vary. This paper explored the functions of RVs across sciences. To this end, 200 “Results and Discussion” section of RAs from the four sciences, namely Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the data, and their functions of RVs were analyzed based on Hyland’s framework (2002). Hyland (2002) considered three basic RV types based on their function, including research, cognitive, and discourse acts, subsequently dividing each category into several subcategories. The results showed that the writers in Life Sciences used more research acts in comparison to the other disciplines. In terms of cognition acts, the rates of tentative verbs were high in all sciences since the researchers tried to report the results with caution as they were uncertain about the findings. The results approved this claim, indicating the high frequency of tentative verbs under the category of discourse acts, across disciplines using verbs like hypothesize, indicate, and suggest to show doubt with different rates. The obtained results can guide novice writers of the above-mentioned four disciplines to advance an authorial perspective and adjust to the expert conventions of the relevant research areas.