A Comparative Study of Proximity in Applied Linguistics and Biology: The Case of Research Articles

The present article investigates how writers in Applied Linguistics and Biology fields interact with their readers. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 100 Biology and 100 Applied Linguistics research articles published in 2015, this study draws upon Hyland’s (2010) proximity perspective and takes all its five elements into account: organization, argument structure, credibility, stance, and reader engagement. Therefore, the most recurrent proximity elements in the research articles of both fields as well as the resources for the coding of these elements in the texts are spotted, analyzed, and exemplified. The results reveal different interactional and proximity features within both sets of data. As a matter of fact, Applied Linguistics academic writers are more inclined to breach the writer/reader distance and construct a close relationship with the readers than their Biology counterparts. Such a difference is due to the fact that Social Sciences mainly deal with making claims, further explanations, and more clarifications about the subject matters in dispute, but the Natural Sciences subordinate their personal roles and voices to indicate that results and findings would be the same whoever carried out the study.