A Genre Analysis of Linguistics Research Articles Written by Iraqi University Instructors of English

Abstract

This study investigates the macrostructure of linguistic research articles (RAs) from a
communicative purpose perspective through descriptive statistical analysis. The corpus consists of
25 English RAs written by Iraqi scholars. The corpus is grouped according to the type of research
followed into discourse analysis, stylistic, qualitative, quantitative, comparative studies, and
literature reviews. Following this genre analysis, the macrostructure of primary research articles is
identified. The results reveal that the organization of linguistic RAs consists of five moves:
introducing the current research, presenting the theoretical background, presenting the
methodology, stating the results, and discussing the findings. Move 3 and 6 are the mostly
missing moves from some of the studies investigated, which indicates disciplinary influences on
this genre. Besides, the embedding with other steps appears to be the salient featurein Move 6.
However,a 100% frequency of occurrence foregrounds Move 2 “Presenting the theoretical
background”.This study can enrich the field of genre analysis and provide pedagogical benefits
for English teaching and academic writing instruction in Iraq. It can also help EFL learners write
effective English RAs with increased knowledge of macrostructure of linguistic RAs.