A Move Analysis of Discussion Section of Medical Articles

Sorour Zekrati

《Taiwan International ESP Journal》 Volume 7 Issue 1 (2015/06) Pp. 38-50

https://doi.org/10.6706/TIESPJ.2015.7.1.2

Parallel abstracts

The genre of medical research articles, albeit important, has been the subject of only a few move analysis discussion papers. The scarcity of such research could prove problematic for those non-native scholars who are not so skillful in writing and at the same time wish to share their medical findings with the relevant community. This study, through comparing and elaborating discussion section moves of medical articles, aims to help non-native researchers, including Iranian and non-Iranians, to understand what makes a successful medical research article discussion section, in which they successfully defend their findings. To this end, 32 medical (Neurology) articles' ‘discussion’ sections were randomly chosen to be used as the corpus of the study. Moves were first identified using the ＂AntMover＂ software and then checked by human coder. Based on the results of the Mann-Whitney U test, a statistically significant difference was found in the move frequency of the discussion sub-genre of published medical journal papers which were written by non-native English speaking Iranian and non-Iranian writers. Descriptive statistics also showed move frequencies, and indicated obligatory, optional and conventional moves in all the selected medical articles. It was concluded that non-natives, especially Iranian writers, need to focus on move structures, be move-sensitive, and adhere to conventional move structures in their academic writing.

Parallel keywords

Genre ； Discussion section ； Move ； Medical ； Writing

References

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Hopkins, A., & Dudley-Evans, T. (1988). A genre-based investigation of the discussion sections in articles and dissertations. English for Specific Purposes, 7, 113-121.

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Kanoksilapatham, B. (2005). Rhetorical structure of biochemistry research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 24, 269-292

Peacock, M. (2002). Communicative moves in the discussion section of research articles. System, 30 (4), pp. 479-497.