A GENRE-BASED ANALYSIS OF METHODOLOGY SECTIONS IN LINGUISTICS RESEARCH ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

The present study explores the rhetorical move-step structure of English Linguistics research articles published in Higher Education Commission (HEC) recognized Pakistani journals. It outlines macro-structural strategic moves and micro-strategic steps of methodology reporting practices in Pakistani journals, keeping in view the lack of empirical research focused on this important strand of academic writing. The corpus consisted of 30 research articles (from the period 2016–2026), purposively sampled across the three categories of Pakistani journals, namely W, X, and Y. The texts were coded manually following the genre-analytical framework of John Swales (1990, 2004) as modified by Lim (2006) and Peacock (2011) to find out the frequencies of moves, the patterns of moves, and the move thresholds. The results indicate that there was no uniform structure and a significant imbalance in the rhetoric between the publication levels. Pakistani researchers are able to use descriptive moves (Describing the Sample (Move 2), Describing Instrumentation (Move 3), and Describing Procedures (Move 4)), but usually do not include evaluative elements, making Justifying Methodological Choices (Move 5) an optional phenomenon. The findings emphasized the dire need for greater awareness and explicit teaching of rhetorical argumentation among the local research community, to make the research of the Pakistanis more visible and acceptable internationally.