A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH DISCUSSION SECTIONS BETWEEN APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY JOURNALS PUBLISHED IN THAILAND: A CORPUS ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the rhetorical move patterns and obligatory and optional moves of English discussion sections in international journals of Applied Linguistics and those of Science and Technology published in Thailand. The corpus consisted of 60 discussion sections of four Applied Linguistics journals and 60 discussion sections of four Science and Technology journals during the period 2013-2017. Applied Linguistics journals had 71,576 words in total with an average of 1,193 words whereas Science and Technology journals contained 38,360 words with an average of 639 words. The analysis framework used in this study was Yang and Allison’s (2003) move model. The model consisted of 7 moves and 10 steps. The findings showed some differences in the move structure of Applied Linguistics journals and Science and Technology journals. Both data sets showed the same three obligatory moves-- Move 1 (Background information), Move 2 (Reporting results), Move 4 (Commenting on results)-- and three optional moves-- Move 3 (Summarizing the study), Move 5 (Summarizing the study), Move 6 (Evaluating the study), Move 7 (Deductions from the research).