A contrastive genre-based study: English and Malay

This paper reports on a contrastive genre-based study comparing the employment of communicative purposes (moves) and rhetorical strategies (steps) between Malay and English research article discussions in using the move-structure models proposed by Holmes (1997). The focus is on research article discussions in the field of humanities and social sciences. Results show that both sets of discussions emphasize Move 2 (evaluating the findings). Overall, article discussions in both languages show the presence of the three moves (introductory, evaluation and conclusion) although Move 1 and Move 3 are under-represented in Malay discussions. The rhetorical-step model of English discussions that emerged in the present study (see Table 1) will be worth exploring with language instructors and ESL (English as second language) students (Malay ESL students in particular) in EAP classrooms.