A comparative study of thematic progression and organization in sub-discipline articles of applied linguistics in local and international journals

Abstract This study is a corpus analysis of thematic organization and progression in local and international articles written in sub-disciplines of applied linguistics. Having read and analyzed the "introduction" sections of 120 articles in four local and four international journals, the researchers investigated the results within the Hallidyian Categorization of theme as well as Daneʹs revised models of thematic progression chains. Results show that the majority of topical themes were unmarked, although the number of unmarked themes in international journals was less than those in local papers. There was no significant difference in total number of textual themes of both groups in the study. In both groups of articles, coordinated conjunctions were used less frequent than conjunctive adjuncts. The most frequent types of interpersonal themes in both groups of articles were of finite operators although they were used more by international writers. The frequency of using marked themes in international articles was more than double compared with local articles although they were used in a similar way in both groups of articles. The intra-comparisons showed no significant difference among themes written in both local and international journal. However, some differences were found in inter or cross-comparisons. Finally, cross-comparisons showed significant differences among the thematic progression chains in articles written in two groups.