The Impact of Discipline-Specific Variation in English on Shaping Iranian ESP Writers’ Schematic Borders in their Expertise: A Move Analysis Study of Disciplinary Research Articles ‘Conclusions’

Having active participation in today’s more universally-networked research community through publishing in valid English journals has become delicate for the most populated contemporary users of English as a foreign language known as ‘ESP writers. This challenge is typically experienced in ESP authors’ variation in employing the generic move patterns in the overall structure of the academic research articles (RAs) ‘Conclusions’ sections, probably caused by heterogeneity in ‘English’ across the authors’ discipline-specific fields of expertise. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to analyze the organizational moves/steps of the RAs ‘conclusions’ to examine any significant difference/s in the discipline-specific authors’ writing styles in terms of the ‘type’ and ‘frequency’ of the moves/steps under study. To this end, 160 randomly selected RAs conclusions (RACs) from eight academic disciplines equally representing the hard sciences and soft sciences, were comparatively analyzed based on a conflated ESP move analysis model of Yang and Allison (2003), and Moritz, Meurer and Dellagnelo (2008). The results of the study obtained from the Frequency counts, Chi-square tests and the Effect Size measure revealed statistically significant differences between the frequency of moves/steps of the RACs in both discipline-specific groups of sciences; in addition, it was found that generic move patterns of the RACs did not strictly follow the proposed model. However, Pedagogical and practical implications along with suggestions for further studies are presented.