The Use of Code Glosses in Introduction Section of the Research Articles of Applied Linguistics by Native and Non- Native Authors

Academic writers resort to code glosses as one of the interactive metadiscourse category not only to contribute to the construction of effective, well-organized articles, but also to guide the reader to organize, interpret, and evaluate the information given. This study aimed at examining the frequency and types of code glossses employed by English Research Writers (ERWs) and Iranian Research Writers (IRWs) in the introduction section of academic research articles (RAs) in the field of Applied Linguistics. To this end, a corpus of 30 research articles published in leading journals (15 for each group) were randomly selected and analyzed through descriptive statistics in terms of frequency, then chisquare was run to spot the differences. The results revealed that although both groups of writers employed different types of code glosses, no significant difference was observed between English and Iranian authors’ writings with respect to the use of code glosses. The present findings can be applied to design tasks and materials for teaching writing that focus not only on grammar but also on rhetorical structures and various genres of writing. This study can also have pedagogical implications for EFL course designers as well as academic writing instructors and students.