The Novice Writers’ Meta-pragmatic Awareness In Constructing Moves Of Research Papers

Research papers(RPs),as a typical genre,attract a great attention from scholars.Many studies have examined Abstract,Introduction,Research Methods,Discussion,and Conclusion sections of research papers,and the research topics include the structure of moves,usage of meta-discourse,usage of lexical chunks,rhetorical functions,identity construction and so on.Among them,the move structure of research papers is a hot issue.The CARS(i.e.,Create a Research Space)model for Introduction moves of research papers proposed by Swales(1990,2004)has been widely used as a framework to analyze move structures of sections in research papers.Although the move analysis of research papers has achieved fruitful results,compared with other parts,the Conclusion section is relatively less discussed.At the same time,the existing studies mainly focus on the published research papers and the genres analysis of MA theses and doctoral dissertations.Few studies investigate the move structures of research papers written by novice writers.On the other hand,writer’s meta-pragmatic awareness has been a hot topic in the field of linguistics in recent years.The study of the writers’ meta-pragmatic awareness is helpful to reveal how they organize their research papers.However,few studies have examined writers’ meta-pragmatic awareness when they construct move structures in their research papers.Therefore,this study aims to probe into the novice writers’ meta-pragmatic awareness when they construct move structures of their conclusion sections in research papers,thus providing an explanation for the formation of the move structures from the perspective of meta-pragmatic awareness and consequently promoting the existing research on the move structures,the development of writing abilities of novice writers and the meta-pragmatic awareness.This study was conducted on the basis of 56 research papers including the conclusion section from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers(MICUSP)and attempted to address the following research questions:1.What are the features of move construction in the Conclusion section of research papers written by novice writers?2.What meta-discourse strategies are used to construct moves of the Conclusion section of research papers written by novice writers?3.What meta-pragmatic awareness is made salient in novice writers’ constructing moves of the Conclusion section in research papers?Based on the move models proposed by Swales(1990,2004),Posteguillo(1999)and Yang & Allison(2003),this study divides the conclusion section of research papers written by novice writers into five moves,i.e.,Summary of the Study(Move 1),Conclusions/Findings of the Study(Move 2),Implications of the Study(Move 3),Limitations of the Study(Move 4)and Recommendation of the Future Research(Move 5).In addition,this study analyzes the novice writers’ meta-pragmatic awareness when they construct moves of the conclusion section in research papers based on the framework of meta-pragmatic awareness proposed by Verschueren(1999)and the classification of meta-pragmatic awareness made by Culpper & Haugh(2014)and Chen(2020).The results of the study are as follows:Firstly,Move 2(Conclusions/Findings of the Study)appears in 54 research papers,with a very high percentage of 96.43,and it is followed by Move 1(Summary of the Study)appearing in 35 RPs and Move 5(Recommendation for the Future Research)appearing in 29 RPs,with a relatively high percentage of 62.50 and 51.79 respectively.22 research papers(39.29%)include Move 4,namely Limitations of the Study,and 15 research papers(26.79%)have Move 3(Implications of the Study).Furthermore,only 3 research papers(5.36%)consist of five moves,5 research papers(8.93%)consist of only one move,20 research papers(35.71%)include three moves,10 research papers(17.86%)consist of four moves and the remaining 18 research papers(32.14%)are composed of two moves.Secondly,the meta-discourse strategies used in different moves is different in frequency.In Move 1,novice writers frequently use the first person pronouns to construct moves to show the author’s explanation about the background and objects of the study.Move 2 is about the results or findings,and thus,the frequency of “result,”“conclude,” “show” and some other meta-discourses is relatively high.In Move 3,“implication” and “valuable” are mainly used to indicate the implications of the study.In Move 4,novice writers use “limitation” and “different” to present the limitations of the study.The last section(Move 5)is about suggestions for the future research,which is demonstrated by “future,” “further” and “furthermore.”Finally,the study finds that the meta-pragmatic awareness of the conclusion section mainly focuses on the three types,that is,the meta-pragmatic awareness about oneself,the meta-pragmatic awareness about the information and the meta-pragmatic awareness about organizing the discourse.Novice writers mainly use interactive meta-discourse,information meta-discourse and textual meta-discourse to highlight oneself,construct the view and the attitude of the point and elaborate the information,choose the topic,transfer the topic and organize the discourse structure,which show the meta-pragmatic awareness about the author,the information and the discourse organization respectively.The findings of this study can shed some light on the theoretical discussion on the move structures,the writers’ ability of academic writing and the meta-pragmatic awareness.It also has some pedagogical implications for the novice writers’ research paper writing and English writing teaching for academic purposes.