Grammatical Complexity in Research Articles: Iranian Local Journals and International Journals

Grammatical complexity acts as an indicator of writing quality by contributing to the production and comprehension of writing. This study aimed to investigate the grammatical complexity in research articles published in Iranian local journals and international journals based on Biber, Gray, Staples, and Egbert’s (2020) linguistic description. The corpus of the study included 40 Applied Linguistics research articles, 20 published in Iranian local journals and 20 in international journals in 2019-2020. The research articles were selected through purposive sampling from two Iranian journals, namely the Journals of Research in Applied Linguistics and Teaching Language Skills, and two international journals, including the Journal of English for Specific Purposes and System Journal. The research articles were analyzed in terms of three dimensions of grammatical complexity, including the structural types, syntactic functions, and specific structural/syntactic features. Moreover, for intra-rater consistency, the researcher re-analyzed the corpus after one month to see whether the same results were found. According to the results, in terms of the first dimension (i.e., the structural types), the frequencies of structures indicating higher grammatical complexity (non-finite dependent clauses and dependent phrases) outnumbered the frequency of structures showing lower grammatical complexity (finite dependent clauses) in both local and international journals. Concerning the second dimension (i.e., syntactic function within the structural type), the frequencies of more complex syntactic functions were higher than those of simple functions in both sets of research articles. Concerning the third dimension (i.e., specific structural/syntactic features), both groups of writers preferred to use more complex specific structural/syntactic features than the simple ones. The results of the comparison of the two sets of research articles confirmed that research articles published in international journals were more grammatically complex in terms of the three studied dimensions. Hence, academic writing instructors need to consider and include the findings of this study in their syllabus writing.