Promotion through claiming centrality in L1 and L2 English research article introductions.

Abstract

Marketization in all public spheres, including academic discourse, has led to the increased importance of promotion. One of the promotional tools usually used in Research Articles Introductions (RAIs) is claiming centrality. In this study, we aimed to explore differences between native and non-native writers in the use of strategies for claiming centrality in Applied Linguistics RAIs. To this end, a corpus of 50 English RAIs (25 L1 and 25 L2) was analyzed in terms of the strategies used for claiming centrality. The analysis of the two sets of texts revealed that they are similar in the mean occurrence of centrality claims in general while in terms of the specific strategies used for claiming centrality, there are differences between them. The findings of this study can be used by instructors of writing courses to address promotion better as well as by article authors to report their research findings more convincingly.