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Electronic mail (e-mail) as a means of fast and effective communication which has removed the barriers of distance and time has become very commonplace and important in institutional environments. Speakers of English as a foreign language across different disciplines need to enhance their awareness of the generic and formal features of the e-mail genre in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their correspondence. Following genre analysis studies such as Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), Santos (2002), Vergaro (2004), and Samraj and Monk (2008), and in line with studies on electronic messages such as  Gains (1999), Gimenez (2000, 2006), and Jensen (2009), the present genre-based research was conducted to analyse e-mails exchanged between EFL teachers and biology professionals for the purposes of requesting and providing information at two criteria of the macro-textual and micro-levels of the two corpora to present a tentative model. The results revealed clear discrepancies between the parallel constitutive moves, strategies and formal features due to cross-disciplinary variations and the prevalence of intertextuality. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for devising courses, preparing teaching materials and raising ESP instructors' awareness of learners' problems.  

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Research Article (RA), in particular, its structure, social construction and historical evolution, has been focused upon through a large number of studies on academic writing over the past 20 years. This paper reports an analysis of research article introductions from three related fields, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Psycholinguistics, and Sociolinguistics, using Swales’ CARS model. The corpus consisted of 90 RAs drawn from a wide range of refereed journals in the corresponding disciplines. The results of the analysis, although revealing marked differences across the disciplines regarding Move 2/step 1B, indicate no marked differences in research article introductions across the disciplines in terms of Move 1 and 3 along with their constituent steps. Furthermore, no marked differences are found in terms of the extent of concordance between the CARS model and the move structure of the RAs analyzed. The results also underline the need for further research into the CARS model and provision of a more flexible and open-ended structure, one which is pattern-seeking rather than pattern-imposing and provides the writer/researcher with the necessary options for the inclusion of further steps, one in which free-standing steps are not assigned rigid functions and positions in the overall structure but are multi-functional or multi-purpose and can be shuffled in the overall structure.  

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The present study was conducted to examine the hedging phenomenon, an important linguistic feature which is concerned with the expression of tentativeness and possibility, in journalistic English. It specifically aimed at examining English and Persian social, economic and political newspaper editorials to describe the similarities and differences in the frequency of hedging devices in the two languages. The results revealed that English newspaper editorials enjoyed more hedges than Persian ones. Regarding topic variations, English political editorials were slightly more hedged than the economic and social ones whereas, Persian economic editorials were slightly more hedged than the political and social ones.

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The current study tries to investigate the particular role familiarity with the genre of the text plays in EFL learners’ performance on two types of tests, i.e. cloze test and C-test. It also attempts to determine whether C-test is a measure of language proficiency like cloze test. The participants of the study were fifty-one intermediate undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. In two sessions, the participants took a battery of measures (a) two newly developed cloze tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres, and (b) two newly developed C-tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres. The results of data analysis revealed that familiarity with genre has a significant impact on the performance of EFL learners on both cloze test and C-test. The results further disclosed that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency, and C-test with the same genre. 

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Academic writing has tended to focus on research articles far more than on post-graduate theses (Bunton, 2005 Swales, 1990). Of the studies based on theses, relatively little research has focused on the generic structure of Suggestions for further research. To supplement the sparse knowledge in this area, the current study investigated the schematic structure (i.e., moves and steps) of Suggestions for further research andexplored the metadiscoursal features commonly used in this section of theses. The corpus included 80 PhD dissertations and 80 MA theses from Iranian universities in applied linguistics. The moves and the corresponding steps were identified and, for a detailed analysis, Hyland’s (2005) classification of metadiscourse was used. Findings revealed four moves in this part genre, named, Justification of the present study, Suggestions for repetition of the current study, Implications of the study, and The researcher’s hopes. The MA and PhD theses showed differences in the use of them. The results can broaden the understanding of the nature and function of this part genre and the way the metadiscoursal features are realized accordingly, the study can have important implications for students’ thesis writing. 

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In response to the competitive demands for establishing their international academic and financial credentials, the universities globally distribute some online introductory information about themselves. To this end, the university homepages have increasingly turned into the rhetorical space for the development of promotional academic texts in recent years. In this study, we examined university overview genre that provides the visitors with brief presentation of the simple facts while endorsing a specific perspective of the university and strengthening its position in the academic community. The corpus comprised 70 overviews extracted from the academic websites of the first top 500 universities. We analyzed and coded the texts to specify their overall rhetorical framework, functional moves and constituting steps, and optimal order of moves. The findings indicated that overview genre incorporates six obligatory moves including 'source of reputation', 'historical origin', 'current status of development', 'commitments, goals and orientations', 'global state', and 'services and supports'. Also, the results demonstrated that the academic genre did not follow a single, invariant pattern of sequenced moves in a clearly linear order. The findings further suggest that the nature of overview genre could be characterized by its twofold informative and persuasive functions. Finally, implications of the findings of the study are presented

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