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Title
A Contrastive Intercultural Analysis of the English and Persian Research Articles: The Case of the Discussion Sections

Authors
Zahra Amirian (Ph.D.)
University of Isfahan
 Mansoor Tavakoli (Ph.D.)
University of Isfahan

Bio Data
Zahra Amirian, Ph.D. in TEFL from the University of Isfahan, Iran. She has taught English to Persian EFL students for more than 10 years. Her research interests are contrastive rhetoric and genre analysis.

Mansoor Tavakoli, Ph.D. in TEFL from the University of Isfahan, Iran. He is an assistant professor and has taught English in the University of Isfahan for more than 12 years. His research interests are language teaching and assessment.

          English has acquired the status of the international language. As a result, research articles in English have become one of the main channels for distributing and advancing scientific knowledge among scholars world-wide (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996). English research articles are distinctive in many aspects such as organization, conventions and features of the language being used, all of which reflect the values and beliefs held by the particular community of researchers. To facilitate the writing of research articles, different scholars have attempted to study different sections of research articles taking a “genre analysis” approach. In line with studies conducted by Hopkins and Dudley-Evans, (1988); Holmes, (1995); Biria and Tahririan, (1997); and Kanoksilapatham, (2005), this study was an attempt to reveal the generic structure of research articles written and published by English writers as well as Persian writers with the purpose of identifying culture-specific conventions of this genre. The results revealed significant differences in frequency, sequence, and even communicative functions of the moves and steps across the two RA groups. The differences may be partly due to the influence of cultural conventions associated with RA writing in the two languages. The results may have implications for EAP practitioners as well as EFL writers/researchers who wish to get their papers published in international journals.

Key Terms: Genre, Research articles, Moves, Steps, Lexico-grammatical features