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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.
Sec. Scholarly Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frma.2024.1337836

The Evolving Trajectory of Conjunction Use in the ELT Research Articles

Provisionally accepted
Fatemeh Mahdavirad Fatemeh Mahdavirad Marzieh Safari Marzieh Safari *
  • Yazd University, Yazd, Yazd, Iran

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The present study was aimed at a diachronic investigation of conjunction as a grammatical cohesive device in ELT research articles. A total number of 100 research articles concentrating on teaching writing skills in the EFL context, and were released in two extremes of 1980-82 and 2020-22 were selected. The caution was taken to choose the papers which were written by expert English writers. Working within a descriptive-analytical framework and employing Liu's (2008) categorization, the type and frequency of conjunctions used in the articles were examined. The results depicted that the frequency of conjunctions increased at the expense of dropping in their variation. Having looked more closely, we found that particular conjunctions grew in use while the others fell out of the writers’ favor. This pattern was also visible in the studies in which non-English writers’ research articles were examined. This change, therefore, is attributed to the development of the speech community and the rise of non-English writers. Eventually, we concluded that it might be better to revise our material in ESP classes to adapt to the changes in a speech community.

    Keywords: Academic writing, cohesion, conjunction, Research articles, Old papers, Modern papers

    Received: 18 Nov 2023; Accepted: 04 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mahdavirad and Safari. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Marzieh Safari, Yazd University, Yazd, Yazd, Iran

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