Comparison of Rhetorical Moves in the Results Section of Two Disciplines

Research article (RA) is a prominent communicative genre among members of the academic discourse community. It constitutes several subgenres at the macro level, however, disciplinary variation is seen greater in the Results section in comparison to the Introduction and Discussion sections. This study aims to investigate the rhetorical structure of the Results section in terms of moves and steps between two disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry. A mixed- method of qualitative and quantitative analysis was conducted in this cross-disciplinary study. A corpus of 40 (20 from each discipline) RAs were selected for the study. The comparison of rhetorical moves in the Results section of RAs revealed that the variety of moves utilized in the Results section was similar. Five moves were found in this section in both applied linguistics and chemistry research articles. The findings point to some pedagogical implications for teaching research article writing in EAP courses.