A COMPARISON OF NICHE ESTABLISHMENTS IN ENGLISH RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS PUBLISHED IN INTERNATIONAL AND THAI JOURNALS

The present study looked closely at the niche establishments in the introduction sections of English research articles written by Thai authors and published in local Thai journals and compared them to those found in introduction sections written by non-Thai authors published in international and high indexed journals. Each of the two corpora contains forty introductory sections. The analysis was based on the frameworks of Swales (2004) and Lim (2012). It was found that the use of niche establishments in the international corpus was higher than that in the Thai corpus. In the Thai corpus, “Stressing insufficient research” was the highest strategy, but “Revealing methodological limitations” was completely absent. It is expected that the results will provide practical guidance for novice writers to write their research introduction sections with informative and convincing niche establishments and, to some extent, the results should also benefit English writing classes, especially in Thailand

A Move-based analysis of the conclusion sections of research articles published in International and Thai journals

This paper reports on an analysis of the conclusion sections of English research articles published in Thai and international journals. A comparison was made between 20 conclusion sections in international journals and 20 conclusion sections in Thai journals written by Thai writers in the field of applied linguistics. The two corpora were analysed using Yang and Allison’s (2003) move model. The results revealed that all three moves of the proposed model occurred in the two sets of data but with differences in their frequency of occurrence. There were no obligatory moves or steps in the two corpora. Move structures in the conclusion sections of the Thai corpus varied more from the proposed model than those of the conclusion sections in the international corpus. The findings could assist considerably in an understanding of the rhetorical move structure of the conclusion sections of research articles. In addition, they may yield implications for a pedagogical framework for the teaching of academic writing, syllabus design, and genre-based teaching and writing

An Error Analysis of Research Project Abstracts Written by Thai Undergraduate Students

Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students’ writing. It is believed that identifying students’ written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers’ awareness of the serious problems which occur in students’ writing and allows them to pay closer attention to their errors. The aim of the present research study is to pinpoint writing errors in English abstracts written by Thai undergraduate students. Forty abstracts of research projects were collected and analysed. The error analysis was conducted at the sentence level, word level, and mechanics aspect. The five most frequent error types ranking from the most frequent to least frequent were word choice, preposition, sentence construction, singular or plural forms and quotation marks. The findings of the present study have shed light on the students’ writing ability and give an insight into what the problems students face when writing their abstracts. Also, the errors found in the abstracts in the present study have pedagogical implications concerning English language learning, particularly with writing courses. The findings will be helpful for teachers to develop teaching materials to assist their students from committing errors when writing English abstracts and to improve academic writing skills