Evaluation of Generic Structure of Research Letters Body Section: Create a Research Letter Body Section Model
Research Letters (henceforth RLs) are short scientific papers reporting new and innovative research findings. Previous research has identified that they are shorter in terms of number of papers (Maci, 2008 ; Rutkowsky & Ehrenfest, 2012 ). However, stu
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Abstract Research Letters (henceforth RLs) are short scientific papers reporting new and innovative research findings. Previous research has identified that they are shorter in terms of number of papers (Maci, 2008; Rutkowsky & Ehrenfest, 2012). However, studies have not focused sufficiently on the generic structure of this genre, which is the concern of this chapter. This paper aims at investigating the organizational structure of RLs Body sections and suggesting a model for their formation. The researcher resorted to content analysis to statistically evaluate the place of every sentential function and identify the different phases and the obligatory and optional kind of sentences required for this part of RLs. RL body sections were selected and analysed sentence by sentence. Each sentence was allocated a particular structural element or key. The occurrence and frequency of these functions in the Body sections of each RL were counted in order to identify the shared rhetorical patterns among the 37 randomly chosen RLs. The aim is to contribute to the effort of identifying the hidden structure of this new and under researched genre. The main result of this research paper is the identification of Create A Research Letter Body Model (CARL Body Model). It suggests that the Body of any publishable RL is to contain 58 sentences where 49 are obligatory and 9 are optional. Such a finding is important for it helps researchers in scientific disciplines in writing publishable RLs. Additionally, it supports ESP teachers in teaching writing to future researchers. Keywords Genre analysis functions
Genre teaching
Research letters
Rhetorical
M. Melliti (&) University of Kairouan, Kairouan, Tunisia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 S. Hidri and C. Coombe (eds.), Evaluation in Foreign Language Education in the Middle East and North Africa, Second Language Learning and Teaching, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43234-2_7
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1 Introduction This chapter will evaluate the organizational structure of RLs in an attempt to identify a model for their formation. It starts with revisiting previous studies related to genre analysis before exposing the methodology employed in this study. The article ends up with the results section where the model of formation of research letters body section is detailed. Until the publication of Nwogu’s article in (1997), studies evaluating features of medical discourse had tended to focus on the syntactic elements of texts (as cited in Helan, 2012). One here could mention the example of Pettinari (1981) who studied the functions of grammatical fluctuation in 14 surgical reports and Salager-Meyer (1985) who worked on the classificatory framework and rhetorical function of the professional medical English terminology. However, needless to mention that some studies have attempted to evaluate the way information was organized in scientific research reports such as Adams-Smith (1984) who examined the subjective elements of the authors comments and S
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