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How do applied linguistics researchers structure coherence relations in the process of establishing a niche for their research?

  • Tomoyuki Kawase

    Tomoyuki Kawase is currently affiliated with the Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, Japan. The main areas of his research are English for Research Publication Purposes and dissertation writing. His research interests also include the conceptual relationship between genre, coherence, and metadiscourse. He has publications in journals including Journal of English for Academic Purposes and English Text Construction.

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Published/Copyright: February 9, 2021

Abstract

This study is an extension of previous research on how writers of research articles (RAs) structure their texts to be coherent in the process of achieving communicative purposes of the RA genre. It examines how RA writers relate sentences in establishing a niche for their studies in the introduction section. Genre analysis methods and Rhetorical Structure Theory are used to analyse 40 applied linguistics RA introductions. The findings show that the RA writers who establish a niche by indicating a gap in previous research tend to use a concessive or contrastive relation to relate the gap statements to the descriptions of previous studies. The writers who establish a niche by indicating how their studies would extend previous research in the field tend to use a background relation to claim a niche based on the specific studies. The writers who indicate a real world problem for the niche establishment tend to use a background relation to reveal a niche based on contextual information surrounding the problem. Possible reasons for the selection of the relations are discussed in terms of the influence of the nature of the RA genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.


Corresponding author: Tomoyuki Kawase, Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, 1-3 Tatara Miyakodani, Kyotanabe-shi, 610-0394, Kyoto, Japan, E-mail:

About the author

Tomoyuki Kawase

Tomoyuki Kawase is currently affiliated with the Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, Japan. The main areas of his research are English for Research Publication Purposes and dissertation writing. His research interests also include the conceptual relationship between genre, coherence, and metadiscourse. He has publications in journals including Journal of English for Academic Purposes and English Text Construction.

Appendix: RAs whose introductions are presented as examples in Sections 4.1 and 4.2 (in order of appearance)

  • T36. Pessoa, S., Mitchell, T. D., & Miller, R. T. (2017). Emergent arguments: A functional approach to analyzing student challenges with the argument genre. Journal of Second Language Writing, 38, 42–55.

  • T11. Aull, L. L., Bandarage, D., & Miller, M. R. (2017). Generality in student and expert epistemic stance: A corpus analysis of first-year, upper-level, and published academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 26, 29–41.

  • T30. Svennevig, J. (2018). “What’s it called in Norwegian?” Acquiring L2 vocabulary items in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics, 126, 68–77.

  • T9. Poole, R. (2017). “New opportunities” and “Strong performance”: Evaluative adjectives in letters to shareholders and potential for pedagogically-downsized specialized corpora. English for Specific Purposes, 47, 40–51.

  • T25. Flores-Salgado, E., & Castineira-Benitez, T. A. (2018). The use of politeness in WhatsApp discourse and move ‘requests’. Journal of Pragmatics, 133, 79–92.

  • T15. Kuzborska, I., & Soden, B. (2018). The construction of opposition relations in high-, middle-, and low-rated postgraduate ESL Chinese students’ essays. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 34, 68–85.

  • T10. Wright, H. R. (2019). Lexical bundles in stand-alone literature reviews: Sections, frequencies, and functions. English for Specific Purposes, 54, 1–14.

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Received: 2019-12-20
Accepted: 2021-01-20
Published Online: 2021-02-09
Published in Print: 2022-03-28

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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