Writing the Methods Sections of Research Articles in Language Education

This book is based on an in-depth genre-based inquiry into the Methods sections of research articles written by expert writers for high-impact journals on language education. It lucidly illustrates how the Methods sections of research reports are aptly crafted to meet the expectations of experienced members in an academic discourse community relating to language education in general and the teaching of English in particular. The results reported in this book can be used in the teaching of English for research publication purposes at tertiary level. Drawing on text-based arguments and wide-ranging illustrations incorporated in nine chapters, this book furnishes evidence-based insights into how the Methods sections of research articles can be presented to novice researchers and second language writers by closely connecting communicative functions and rhetorical strategies with their associated linguistic resources. It adopts a newly designed 'Overview-Recounting-Justification' (ORJ) model to explore the corpus, thus demonstrating how expert writers enhance the credibility of their research procedures using a gamut of rhetorical strategies and linguistic mechanisms. Using the findings reported in this volume, instructors can make informed decisions on how to develop research-based materials to systematically raise students' consciousness of the language resources needed in different parts of the Method section.