A COMPARISON OF MOVES IN CONCLUSION SECTIONS OF RESEARCH ARTICLES IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

The purpose of this research was to draw a comparison between the moves used in the two known distinct academic territories, namely Hard and Soft sciences. To meet this end we chose the two fields of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Linguistics to represent Hard and Soft sciences, respectively. Forty research articles written by native and non-native researchers were selected from Mechanical Engineering and Applied Linguistics. The Conclusion and Implication sections of these Research Articles (RA) were analyzed for their moves based on Dadley-Evans’s (1994) model. The frequency analysis of the moves along with a Chi-Square analysis did not show significant differences between the moves employed in Conclusion sections of RAs in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Linguistics. The results also indicated a shortcoming regarding the Model proposed by Dadley Evans (1994) and the findings of the research include Implications to develop a new and more sophisticated Model for the analysis of the Conclusion sections of RAs.