Evaluative Strategies in Iranian and International Research Article Introductions: Assessment of Academic Writing

Despite a spate of interest in the study of the Introductions of scholarly articles, thefocal genre of knowledge construction, research is yet to reach conclusive answers onthe nature of this genre. Thus, the present study analyzed research articleIntroductions, aiming to explore how the process of knowledge construction isachieved by Iranian and international writers of English research articles. The researchinvestigated the ways by which Iranian writers apply evaluative stance as theyconstruct an argument for their own research. To this end, the researchers, initially,analyzed 80 research article Introductions to find the instances of explicit Attitude andthen to spot the Graduation resources that grade explicit Attitude. The resultsconspicuously revealed that the international writers, compared to the Iranian writers,tended to apply a greater proportion of explicit Attitude and Graduation resources.Lack of variety to grade explicit Attitude in the process of constructing an argumentwithin the Introduction section of the Iranian English articles might indicate that, atleast, some of these articles did not completely conform to the conventions ofdiscourse community.