A Comparison of Moves in Conclusion Sections of Research Articles in Psychology, Persian Literature and Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Literature abounds with genre analysis studies on different sections of Research Articles in various languages and fields; however, scant attention has been given to Persian articles. Hence, this genre-based study analyzed the rhetorical move structure of conclusion sectionsin three different disciplines: applied linguistics, psychology, and Persian literature. A corpus with 30 articles from leading international and Persian journals was devised. This corpus was analyzed for the move structure based on Yang and Allison's (2003) framework. After analyzing each article, the major moves were extracted and the frequencies were calculated and compared. Although the cross-disciplinary and cross‐linguistic analyses unfolded significant variation regarding Move 2, they revealed no marked differences in conclusion sections of the articles on psychology and applied linguistics. However, Persian literature articles displayed more variation, which, in turn, may suggest that in the Parisian articles, writers follow a standard of their own for writing conclusion sections. The study has pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.