Peripheral Themes in Applied Linguistics Articles

There is considerable agreement among linguists that thematic analysis offers writers insights into manuscripts that may be rejected by international journals due to thematic organization problems. Whereas many comparative studies have provided valuable information about thematic progression (TP), the role of peripheral themes (PTs) has almost been neglected. Using the revised model of the TP proposed by McCabe (1999), this study incorporated a corpus of 32 experimental RAs, aiming to find out the possible similarities/differences in exploiting the PTs between the ELT RAs of local and international journals. Analysis revealed that different types of PTs were exploited in both samples, and their frequencies were fairly similar. These similarities were justified by the fact that the sample papers represented the shared genre. Results also suggested that PTs should not be considered as marginal themes, but as crucial ones that introduce, organize, and summarize topics.