چكيده فارسي :
One of the most challenging experiences of almost all academics whose native language is not English is publishing their works in English. One source of difficulty for them is how links and transitions in the flow of discourse are managed and scaffolded, how new phases in the discourse are introduced, and how certain meanings are patterned and foregrounded. Informed by discussions under the textual metafunction within systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this study attempted to investigate manuscripts before and after publication to see what is achieved during the revision that makes the texts publishable. To this end, two versions of 60 research articles namely prior to submission (PS) and after publication (AP) were collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis involved the alternations made in different sections of the manuscripts in terms of marked, unmarked, textual, interpersonal and topical themes. Our results showed that revisions made were such that the use of unmarked themes was significantly reduced in the AP texts. Also, there was a reduction of topical themes across all sections of the RAs while the number of textual + topical themes increased noticeably. Based on our results, it seems necessary to devote special attention to the teaching of these resources to the foreign language learners of English in research or ESP courses. No doubt that all these would contribute to the transformation of relatively immature unpublishable pieces of writing into well-crafted mature versions. However, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the texts to be published.
