A Comparison of Moves in Discussion Sections of PhD Dissertations and MA Theses in TEFL and their Relevant Journal Articles

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

10.22132/tel.2023.178825

Abstract

Academic written genres have recently aroused growing interest from various fields of study. However, there is an increasing concern that students have only limited knowledge of what academic genres involve. Despite the pivotal role of the discussion sections in academic genres, there remains a paucity of evidence on detailed examination of their moves. Following Ruiying and Allison’s (2003) model, discussion sections of PhD dissertations, MA theses, and their relevant articles in TEFL were manually analyzed by two human coders to explore what common conventional and optional moves discussions share and what variety they display. Despite few differences, comparison of the three corpora comprising 182 discussions revealed statistically significant similarities in terms of move types and frequencies. Interestingly, calculation and comparison of the move frequencies revealed that moves four (i.e., commenting on results), two (i.e., reporting results), and one (i.e., background information) were the most frequent and predominant ones in the same order and were thus considered as conventional, and the rest of the moves, which occurred less frequently, were labelled as optional. This study could have pedagogical implications for teaching reading and writing skills for academic purposes.

Keywords

References

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