Soft sciences

Although a plethora of research endeavors have investigated the rhetorical structure of the Research Articles (RAs) through the lens of move analysis, Move Recycling (MR) across RA sections has remained unnoticed. The current study sought to bridge this gap by exploring cross-disciplinary variations in the recycling of the Objective move (research questions/hypotheses/purposes) across four conventional sections (Introduction, Method, Result, and Discussion) of RAs. To this end, 600 English RAs from four prestigious journals in six soft science disciplines, published between 2006 and 2018, were selected. The quantitative data analysis results revealed that the Objective move’s recycling was sensitive to the disciplinary variations and RA sections. That is, Economics RAs were the main platforms for recycling the Objective move, and Psychology RAs witnessed the least amount of its recycling. Moreover, Objective move recycling was observed most frequently in the Discussion sections and least frequently in the Method sections of RAs. In the study’s qualitative phase, the RA authors’ rationales for MR, which were received via email, underwent content analysis. Based on the recurrent themes in the RA authors’ responses, four main reasons for MR, including editorial policy, readers’ guidance, discipline conventions, and RA length, were identified. This study’s findings might provide a concise view of MR for researchers, teachers, and students in various disciplines. EAP instructors can raise students’ awareness of MR and encourage them to use it in their RAs as a comprehension facilitator.

The aim of the current study was to examine conjunctions in academic texts. The corpus included 200 conference abstracts, of which 100 were written by Iranian novice writers and 100 by English native speakers. Each group of texts consisted of 50 abstracts from soft sciences and 50 from hard sciences. Following Liu's (2008) taxonomy, the frequency and type of conjunctions were examined. The results revealed that non-native writers use more conjunctions in their conference abstracts. Furthermore, it was found that compared to hard sciences, more conjunctions are employed in soft sciences. Regarding the role of L1, the results showed that non-native writers in soft sciences are more likely to use conjunctions. Moreover, the findings indicated that the most frequent conjunction type used by both native and nonnative writers are adversatives and additives in soft sciences, and additives and adversatives in hard sciences, respectively. The findings of the study have implications for teaching academic writing and material development for writing courses.