Academic Citations within Rhetorical Move Structures in ELT Research Article Introductions Written by Thai and International Scholars

Abstract

The understanding of rhetorical move organization and academic citations is of paramount importance for novice scholars so that they know how to construct a quality research article introduction (RAI). This study is therefore an attempt to identify the ways in which the academic citations of the RAIs written by Thai and international scholars in the field of English language teaching (ELT) were constructed through rhetorical move structures. Based on the analysis of 60 RAIs in the corpora, the citation practice demonstrated its contextual variability within different move-step structures in terms of different sub-types in each corpus. The results showed that citations were a lot more frequently employed by the international ELT scholars than by their Thai ELT counterparts in every move-step structure, especially in Move 3: Presenting the present work. More importantly, under the sub-types of citations, the international scholars tended to use considerably more non-integral structures, including source and identification, while the integral structure, verb-controlling, seemed substantially preferred by Thai scholars. These marked differences in making references to other scholarly work could be due to their diverse socio-cultural norms and writing conventions.