Sub-disciplinary variation in the move structure of English-medium research article introductions in applied linguistics

This article reports on a recent corpus and genre-based investigation of the move structure in research article introductions (RAIs) in two constituent areas of inquiry in applied linguistics, namely language teaching & learning and pragmatics & discourse analysis. The corpus consists of 30 RAIs extracted from 30 parent empirical research articles written by English native speakers and published in high impact English-medium applied linguistics journals between 2011 and 2013. The analytical tool was developed both with reference to Swales’ (1990, 2004) CARS models and a preliminary examination of the corpus built for this particular study. Findings revealed sub-disciplinary corpus-based variations of this schematic structure, both at the move and step tiers.