Explicit and implicit justifications of experimental procedures in language education: Pedagogical implications of studying expert writers’ communicative resources

Abstract

Abstract Writing the Methods section of a research report has occasionally been assumed as a relatively straightforward component, but our experience in postgraduate supervision and thesis examination has revealed that justifications of the experimental procedures in the section often constitute a difficult component that writers need to carefully deal with in the process of crafting their texts. This qualitative investigation therefore focuses on the communicative resources that writers employ to explicitly and implicitly justify their experimental procedures in a quest to boost the acceptability of their research methods. Grounded in a genre-based analytical framework, this paper reveals how writers (i) explicitly justify experimental procedures using subordinate evaluative clauses, facilitation-focused structures and positive lexical words expressing consistency and comparability, and (ii) implicitly justify their procedures using parenthetical citations, adjective-infinitive combinations and related clause structures that subtly demonstrate writers cognizance of their participants’ behaviours. The findings of this study have noteworthy pedagogical implications for the teaching of English for academic purposes in that they clearly illustrate how the language resources of published writers in procedural justifications are closely associated with their persuasive rhetorical strategies.