The main communicative purpose of an RA is to publish a novel piece of research. By doing so, the author(s) of the article may intend both to add to academic knowledge in a particular field and, at the same time, to participate in the social interactions of a particular discourse community. Research article as a knowledge-creating genre and one that “involves social interactions” (Hyland, 2002) needs to:

Benefits for the successful author include social recognition or maintenance of community membership, sometimes manifested in financial rewards, such as research grants. An MA thesis is written as part of the graduation process. It should be an analytical piece of writing that documents research into an issue specifically related to the field of applied linguistics in English. While for some students the only real purpose of writing the paper is ‘survival’ and the completion of a degree, for many others it is part of making the first steps necessary for scholarly work. The latter group’s purpose is similar to that of RA writers’; that is, they wish to participate in the specialist discourse community by reporting their own – though possibly not yet novel – research results. For them, writing an MA thesis is an important step in the acquisition of the methodological, technical, and stylistic norms and conventions of the target discourse community. The research study can be a replication study; it is not necessary to come up with a new approach or completely new findings. Students should also demonstrate that they can critically present previous research in the field, that is, take a unique position and synthesize theory accordingly. Both corpora used in the present study consist of texts written in the field of applied linguistics.