An exploration of rhetorical structure and interactional metadiscourse in architecture research articles (EdD TESOL)

The aim will be to provide inferences to assist in the teaching of English for specific purposes (ESP). Based on Swales’s (1990) concept of the rhetorical move and Hyland’s (2005a) model of interactional metadiscourse, the research provides a textual analysis of 14 research papers from The Journal of Architecture, which were published in 2010 and 2011.

Key findings from the move analysis include the prevalence of nonepistemic introductions, the lack of distinctive Method, Results and Discussion sections, and the saliency of rhetorical moves to contextualise, describe and evaluate an architectural case, and a possible classification of papers according to move frequency in each text. The metadiscourse analysis demonstrates the prominence of engagement markers (despite hedges being the most common category), and variations in metadiscourse features among the articles in terms of frequency of occurrence.