FAISAL AL-MAAMARI -

FINAL-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS JOURNEYING THROUGH WRITING THE DATA-BASED RESEARCH PAPER: A CASE STUDY FROM OMAN'S SULTAN QABOOS UNIVERSITY : CURRICULUM AND MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

Despite the growth in genre analysis of research articles, the literature has been solely concerned with published research articles written by expert writers. This contrasts with the limited attention that this genre has received in the study of disciplinary writing by novices. To address this gap in the literature, this study explores the rhetorical patterns of the data-based research reports written by EFL English major students in an undergraduate research project course at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman using moves analysis. A sample corpus consisting of instructor highly-rated research reports was compiled in order to identify the moves structure of the introduction, literature review, methodology, results and discussion of results sections. The major findings indicate that there is considerable consistency in move structure between the sample student research reports and general move structure as described in the literature. Additionally, there is variation in steps occurring under these moves, especially in methodology, results and discussion of results sections. An important variation is a degree of overlap in the communicative function between the results and discussion of results. Equally, some metalinguistic moves in the literature review, results and discussion were absent. A close examination of this variation of the moves and steps reveals that they are those that are discursively (i.e. linguistically, rhetorically, pragmatically and conceptually) complex for these undergraduate students. Implications for genre-based pedagogy and research to assist undergraduate students in their disciplinary journey of writing the research paper are given.

Dr. Faisal Said Al-Maamari is currently associate professor at the English Department at the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. His main research interests include applied linguistics, language acquisition, teacher education, contrastive rhetoric, and research methods. He can be contacted at faisalf@squ.edu.om