AN ANALYSIS OF MOVE STRUCTURES IN DISCUSSION SECTIONS WRITTEN BY INNER AND EXPANDING CIRCLES OF ENGLISH USERS APPEARING IN INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS

Abstract

Over recent years, the study of rhetorical move analysis has been widely investigated, and there has been a growing interest in the concept of contrastive rhetoric in writing styles employed by native and non-native English users. The present study focused on the rhetorical move structures in the discussion sections written by inner and expanding circles of English users appearing in international journals. Each group of the corpora (inner and expanding circles of English users) comprised 50 discussion sections taken from English for specific purposes and applied linguistics research articles during the years of 2009-2018 retrieved from Scopus and ScienceDirect. Yang & Allison’s (2003) rhetorical move model was used for the data analysis. Based on the analysis, the findings showed that rhetorical moves and steps appearing in Yang & Allison’s model were employed in the discussion sections of both groups of the English users. By considering the rhetorical move occurrences and the cycling structures of the rhetorical moves presented in the discussion sections written by inner and expanding circles of English users, some differences were found. The discussion sections written by the group of expanding circle of English users varied in their structures of rhetorical moves and steps and the structures tended to be constructed more cyclically. However, the organizations in the corpus of inner circle of English users tended to be more complex. The differences of the rhetorical move structures and their cycling structures might be explained by the cultural differences.

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