Informality in Applied Linguistics Research Articles: Comparing Native and Non-Native Writings

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 349 - 373, 26.09.2018

Mohammad Alipour Mona Nooreddinmoosa

https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.464196

Cited By: 3

Abstract

This quantitative-qualitative
study aimed to fathom out whether and how informal features are exploited in
articles of applied linguistics written in English by natives and non-natives.
To this end, a corpus of 200 articles was compiled. We employed the
classification of informal features proposed by Chang and Swales (1999)
representing 10 informal features in academic writing. The AntConc software was
used, along with manual search, to detect the informal features. The frequency,
percentages, and the density per 1000 words of each informal feature were
calculated. The results revealed that informal features are utilized more frequently
in native articles than non-native ones, with no significant differences in the
two corpora in terms of their most and least frequent informal features.
Sentence initial conjunctions are the most recurrent informal features,
while
exclamation marks are employed the least frequently in
both native and non-native articles. Implications for EAP courses are
delineated in the study as well.

Keywords

Informal features, applied linguistics, research articles, natives, non-natives

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