Research Article Introductions in Applied Linguistics: A Comparative Study on the Use of Appeals

Introduction: Although extensive studies have been carried out on the rhetorical structure of research article introduction (RAI), centrality as a promotional strategy has received very little attention. Purpose: To address this lacuna in research literature, this study investigates centrality claims and how the appeals are realized strategically and linguistically. Materials and Methods: 60 RAIs from three-corpora, i.e., 20 English L1 corpus (written by native authors in English), 20 English FL Corpus (written by Indonesian authors in English), and 20 Indonesian L1 corpus (written by Indonesian authors in Indonesian Language), in the field of applied linguistics (AL) were analyzed. The analysis started from the step of claiming centrality found in the authors’ RAIs using the Swales’ (1990) framework. Wang and Yang’s (2015) framework was used to identify the types of appeals in the claiming centrality. Results: This study indicates that the three groups of authors use four types of appeals, namely the appeal to salience, magnitude, topicality, and problematicity. The appeals appear in varied ways, i.e., referring to the research world and the real world. Although application of each appeal in the step of claiming centrality is relatively different in the three groups, some share similarities in using the appeals in terms of referring to the research world and the real world. Conclusion: This study provides pedagogical implications for teaching academic writing, particularly in writing research articles for publication.