A Generic / Discourse Analysis of Research Articles and Students’ Academic Writing Productions. A Corpus-based Study of Algerian Research Articles in the English Language Studies

Abstract

Academic community members share the findings of their research projects through research articles publication. Likewise, the Algerian doctorate students find it mandatory to publish their research findings that are most pertinent to the topic of their doctorate thesis. However, most candidates find this task challenging because of inadequate understanding of academic genre norms and writing skills. Their research articles submission tends to receive an amount of corrections before acceptance or completely rejected if they do not comply to the publication genre and criteria since academic writing of research articles is not given enough time and space for practice in the postgraduate program course. This study, through genre and discourse analysis, explores research articles and students’ academic writing productions in the English language studies. It additionally seeks to investigate EFL Algerian doctoral candidates’ perceptions and attitudes of writing research articles in order to determine the most common encountered difficulties, and suggests adequate strategies to solve their academic writing problems. Data collection was carried out through the use of a questionnaire administered to a sample of doctoral candidates and an interview of 2 academic writing teachers at Biskra university. To evaluate PhD students’ awareness and their academic writing production when writing research articles, a PhD reference corpus of 20 first draft authentic research articles taken from 5 Algerian journals was used for genre and discourse analysis. The qualitative and quantitative data analysis determined that doctorate candidates face some academic writing problems because of inappropriate and scarce practice opportunities of this academic genre. PhD candidates were found to lack awareness of research articles methodology and structure. The teachers expressed their concern about the prominence of enhancing the teaching of research articles writing in Algerian universities as this skill is highly required among all the academic community. Hence, this study raises teachers and students’ awareness to its subject matter and acknowledges the usefulness of a potential course that teaches scientific research articles methodology.