Promoting research through claiming centrality and explicit research contributions in applied linguistics research articles

ABSTRACT

Then, although the above study implies that claiming centrality is an important strategy to promote RAs in applied linguistics, Abdi and Sadeghi (2018) found a bit difference from it, particularly in the type of appeal occurrences.Appeal occurrences in this regard are strategies employed to present claiming centrality in RAIs.Abdi and Sadeghi (2018) investigated how promoting research through claiming centrality is employed in English RAIs in applied linguistics written by English first-language authors (L1) and English second-language authors (L2) using 50 corpora for the analysis: 25 RAIs from each corpus.The findings showed that silence appeals dominate over the other three types of appeal.In this regard, L1 authors employed it in 41% of the total data, and L2 authors employed it in 51% of the total data.This finding also still indicates that emphasizing the significance of the current research topic plays an important role in promoting research articles.
The above reviews suggest that promoting research in RAs is significant, particularly through claiming centrality.Besides, the reviews also indicate that RAs in the disciplines of language, linguistics, applied linguistics, and literary studies published in top-rank journals are more dominantly investigated this far.However, although studies on promoting research in English RAs have been conducted thus far, comparative studies on this issue written by academicians in reputable international journals and Indonesian-accredited journals are still very limited.To my knowledge, none has comparatively investigated research promotion in English RAs between those published in reputable international journals and Indonesian accredited journals, while comparing how they promote their research may provide a more complete and comprehensive understanding for readers, particularly for those whose English is their L2.Also, none has analyzed research promotion through research contribution.Comprehending all these gaps, I intend to analyze comparatively how English RAs in the applied linguistics discipline published in reputable international journals and Indonesianaccredited journals promote their research through claiming centrality and research contribution.For this purpose, I formulate the following research questions: 1. To what extent are claiming centrality and research contributions employed in RAs published in reputable international journals and Indonesian accredited journals to promote their RAs, and do these two data sets have differences?2. What syntactic strategies do these two data sets employ to realize claiming centrality and research contribution to promote their RAs?By investigating these two research questions, the results may provide understandings for readers about how authors of reputable international journals and Indonesian-accredited journals promote their research.Besides, conducting this study may also contribute to design teaching materials for teaching practice, particularly for teaching writing research articles.

METHOD The Context of this Study
This study included five English foreign language (EFL) students who program a subject of genre theory.They were trained and practiced genre analysis within RAs for eight meetings.After that, in meeting nine and ten, each of them was given assignments analyzing claiming centrality and research contribution in 10 English RAIs in the linguistics discipline published in Indonesian accredited journals.In meeting eleven, their analysis results were discussed in class regarding the appropriateness of their data analysis results.After that, in meeting twelve and thirteen, each of them was then given more assignments to analyze these two communicative steps in a different context, 10 English RAIs in the linguistics discipline published in reputable international journals.In the following meeting (meeting fourteen), their analysis results were also discussed to ensure their validity, and regarding the validity, it was presented in different sub-section, the last subsection of this method.

Research Designs
This study employed a combination of descriptive qualitative and quantitative approaches for analyzing both data sets because one approach may not be clear enough to describe the findings.In this regard, a descriptive qualitative approach was used to describe the findings of claiming centrality and research contribution in both data sets descriptively.In contrast, a quantitative approach was used to report the analysis results in nominal form, quantity percentages, and inferential statistical comparison.

Data Sets
This study used 94 English RAs in the linguistics discipline for the data analysis; 47 of which are published in reputable international journals, while the other 47 are published in Indonesian accredited journals (most of them are also in Scopus).The reason for employing these numbers is that they may have represented both data sets because many earlier studies employed fewer corpus or corpora in their data analysis (Abdi & Sadeghi, 2018;Amnuai, 2021;Lim, 2012).
In selecting these two data sets, I employed some selection criteria to find high-quality papers.In selecting international reputable English RAs, all the English articles must be published in Quartile 1 (Q1) of Scopus-indexed journals in the linguistics discipline.Then, the journals must have Scimago Journal Ranks (SJR) 0,35 or above because journals in these ranks may have high quality standards.After using these criteria, five Q1 Scopus-indexed journals were determined; they are Annual review of applied linguistics, Language learning and technology, computational linguistics, journal of specialised translation, and TESL-EJ.In selecting articles as corpus, nine to ten empirical English articles published in these five journals between 2018 and 2022 were randomly selected to find 47 RAs for the international corpus.
In selecting the Indonesian accredited journals, the articles must be published in English journals, and best-accredited linguistics journals in Indonesia (Sinta 1, and Sinta 2).After employing these standard criteria, five well-accredited journals in the linguistics discipline are found: the Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), the International Journal of Language Education (IJoLE), Studies in English Language and Education (SiELE), TEFLIN Journal, and the Journal of English Foreign Language (JEFL).Mostly, these journals are also Scopus-indexed.Then, nine to ten empirical English articles published from 2018 to 2022 in each of these five journals were also selected randomly to meet 47 RAs for the Indonesian corpus.

Data Analysis Procedures Analyzing and coding claiming centrality and research contributions
Identifying and coding claiming centrality and research contribution in both corpora were conducted by five EFL students programming genre studies.As I have presented in the earlier sub-section (the context of this study), all these five students had been trained for eight meetings for the analysis.Thus, they must have been ready and have abilities to analyze the data.
In the analysis, an analytical framework developed by Swales (1990Swales ( , 2004) ) was employed to analyze claiming centrality because it had been widely employed for analyzing rhetorical structures in research article introductions (Alharbi, 2021;Arsyad & Arono, 2016;Suryani et al., 2015).Then, another analytical framework to analyze research contribution was designed based on information found in both data sets.More details of the analytical framework to analyze both data sets are presented in Table 1.

Presenting claiming centrality
In this communicative step means, authors present that their current research topic is significant or important (Swales, 1990(Swales, , 2004)).In applying the above framework to analyze both data sets, student analysts were first trained and instructed to employ a top-down analysis strategy to identify claiming centrality by identifying language signals indicating this communicative step.Once they find the language signals indicating this communicative step, then the context of the texts was deeply analyzed to ensure as it is.Then, the data were coded and reported in a table form.The same strategy and tactic were also employed to analyze the research contribution in both data sets.
To identify the level of importance of claiming centrality and research contribution, the researcher employed an earlier classification approach regarding levels of importance (Warsidi, 2022;Ye, 2019;Zhang & Wannaruk, 2016).This approach is to identify whether these two communicative steps are optional, conventional, quasi-obligatory, or obligatory in the data.

Analyzing syntactic strategies
Syntactic strategy analyses in the present study are to discover whether authors in both data sets tend to employ simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex sentences in expressing both claiming centrality and research contribution.For this purpose, this study employed a syntactic framework for the data analysis (Verspoor & Sauter, 2000).Then, the results were reported in a table form regarding the appearances and the percentages of appearances.

Validities of Data Analysis Results
As this study involved five EFL students programming genre analysis, t-test inferential statistics was applied to ensure the validity of data analysis results.After seven meetings completing a lecture and training in genre analysis, the five EFL students as a group together were instructed to analyze claiming centrality and research contribution within five RAs as samples.Their analysis results were then checked and compared with the researcher's results.The comparison between the students and the researcher's results is presented in Table 2.As shown in Table 2, the p-value of comparative statistics between the researcher and students is 0.37 (bolded number); it is higher than the alpha value (0.05 or 5%).This comparison means that there is no significant difference between the researcher's analysis and the students' analysis results.
After comprehending these comparative results, each of the five students was then instructed to continuously analyze claiming centrality and research contribution in ten international corpus and ten Indonesian corpus.Then, their results were also checked, given feedback, and discussed when an issue appears.These activities are to ensure that they are on the right analysis and to ensure the validity of their data analysis results.

FINDINGS The Uses of Claiming Centrality and Research Contributions to Promote RAs
After analyzing both data sets, the results revealed that most RAs employ claiming centrality to promote their research papers, but only less than 50% of them present their research contributions.Summary analysis results regarding the employments of claiming centrality are presented in Table 3.
Then, summary analysis results regarding the employment of research contribution are described in the next table, Table 4: As presented in Table 3, both data sets tend to present a claiming centrality to promote their RAs.This communicative step only appears in their introduction section.However, international journals employ this step more than Indonesian accredited journals, which appear in 80,85% of international journals and 76,60% of Indonesian journals.Using levels of important classification (Warsidi, 2022;Ye, 2019;Zhang & Wannaruk, 2016), this finding suggests that promoting RAs through claiming centrality is conventional in both data sets, but it is more critical in reputable international journals rather than in Indonesian accredited journals.The difference in employing claiming centrality in these two data sets is not significant because the p-value of inferential statistics shows 0,6188, which is higher than the alpha value of 0,05 (5%).Thus, this inferential statistical comparison implies that the difference between the two data sets in employing claiming centrality is not significant, which means both data sets nearly similar in employing this communicative step.As presented in Table 4, Indonesian-accredited journals present research contributions more than those in reputable international journals to promote their RAs.Indonesian accredited journals employed it in 22 (46,81%) RAs, while international journals employed it in 13 (27,66%) RAs.Employing important levels of earlier studies (Warsidi, 2022;Ye, 2019;Zhang & Wannaruk, 2016), this finding indicates that presenting research contributions is optional in both international and Indonesian accredited journals.Articles in Indonesian accredited journals employed this strategy more than those of reputable international journals; their differences are not significant, but the inferential statistic comparison shows that the p-value (0,0557) is nearly the alpha value (0,05).Thus, this finding indicates that although their difference is not significant, their p-value is nearly significant.This communicative step mostly appears in their conclusion section.More details about presenting research contributions from both data sets are presented in Figure 1.As shown in Figure 1, presenting research contributions appears to be dominant in the conclusion section and then followed in the introduction section in both data sets.However, as shown in the data, not all RAs employ this communicative step in their RAs.None of international authors presents this communicative step either in their abstract, literature review, or discussion.This finding implies that presenting research contribution is optional in both data sets.To show more clearly the ways employing claiming centrality and presenting research contribution, the researcher describes and exemplifies them as follows:

Claiming centrality
This communicative step appears in most RAs from both data sets.It indicates that this step is conventional in both data sets.Its appearances are exemplified as follows: Ex.1: English language teaching and learning is growing significantly in the "expanding circle" (Kachru, 1985), and Asia is becoming the largest market area for education (Hengsadeekul, et al., 2014).IndoJAL02 Ex.2: English has gradually increased in importance in Indonesia at all levels of education, more so than when it was appointed as the first foreign language to be taught in Indonesia after its independence in 1945 (Candraningrum, 2016).IndoJAL04 Ex.3:The ability to comprehend social norms and use language appropriately is what we understand as pragmatic competence (Kasper & Ross, 2002) and is an essential component of communicative competence (Hymes, 1972).
Being pragmatically appropriate when speaking to others is important for successful social interaction.InterJAL05 The above examples are the ways authors present their centrality claims because, in these regards, authors promote their current research topics as significant, important, and pivotal in their fields.Thus, these examples are included as parts of claiming centrality.

Research contributions
This communicative step is optional in both data sets because its appearances are less than 50% of the total corpus in both data sets.More details about the ways authors present their research contribution in their RAs are exemplified below:

Ex.4: The findings of this study shed light on the types of linguistic problems;
Grammarly detects in students' critical book reviews, critical article reviews, and mini-research assignments.Instructors of English as a second or foreign language can use the findings of this study to help their students develop their writing skills.IndoJAL12 Ex.5:The main pedagogical implication of our findings is that GT has the potential to be used as a pedagogical tool for self-directed language learning via a combination of its translation, TTS, and ASR capabilities, using some of the learning strategies uncovered by our research.InterJAL04 Ex.6: Second, since this study focuses on how learners consulted corpora in patternhunting and pattern-refining activities in the drafting stage of writing, it would be useful for future research to explore the process and learning effects of pattern-hunting and pattern-refining activities in different stages of the writing process, such as the revising stage of writing.InterJAL06 The above examples, particularly those in bolded texts, are the ways authors present their research contributions.Here, the authors show that conducting their research may contribute to knowledge development practically and theoretically.However, only less than half of them present this communicative step.

Syntactic Strategies to Express Claiming Centrality and Research Contributions
This section aims to report the analysis results regarding syntactic choices to campaign claiming centrality and research contributions found in both data sets as research promotions.Here, simple sentence is the most dominant syntactic type to campaign claiming centrality in both data sets, which appears in 55,32% of international journals and 46,15% of Indonesian accredited journals.However, to campaign research contributions, Indonesian accredited journals still tend to employ simple sentences (59,26%), while international journals mainly use complex sentences (69,20%).More details about syntactic strategies used to campaign claiming centrality and research contributions are presented in Table 5.Table 5 shows that in expressing claiming centrality, both data sets are similar; they tend to employ simple sentences more than other sentence types.However, in campaigning research contributions, while Indonesian accredited journals still mainly use simple sentences, international journals tend to utilize complex sentences.These findings indicate that authors in both data sets mostly employ simple sentences to promote their research, except international journals employ different syntactic strategies from those publishing RAs in Indonesian accredited journals.
In short, the data analysis results revealed that in promoting research, both reputable international and Indonesian accredited journals tend to employ claiming centrality more than presenting research contributions.In employing these two communicative steps to promote their research, however, there is no significant difference in both data sets.Then, regarding syntactic strategies that they employed, both data sets tend to employ simple sentences more than the other sentence types, except reputable international journals which tend to employ complex sentences to express research contribution.These findings are discussed more in the discussion section in the following section below.

Claiming Centrality and Research Contribution to Promote Research
The data analysis results revealed that both reputable international journals and Indonesian accredited journals mostly employed claiming centrality to promote their research, and indicate that this communicative step is taken into account as conventional for promoting research in both data sets.However, these two data sets rarely present their research contribution for promoting their research and indicate that this communicative strategy is only optional in both data sets.In this regard, although these two data sets employed different numbers of claiming centrality and research contribution, their differences are not significant.The reason for their difference may be because authors of reputable international journals may suppose that demonstrating the significances of their current research topics may promote their research in public sphere (Wang & Yang, 2015).On the other hand, authors of Indonesian accredited journals may still follow their earlier assumption that emphasizing explicit research contribution in their RAs may convince their targeted audiences because they are expected to overcome practical problematic issues, and thus, they must produce more explicit research contributions (Adnan, 2010;Warsidi, 2021).
These findings indicate that while describing the importance of the current research topics plays an essential role significantly in promoting research to audiences, particularly journal editors and reviewers, presenting research contributions does not have a significant role in promoting research.These also reinforce earlier studies in applied linguistics RAs published in top international journals that claiming centrality also has a big role in promoting research in their data sets (Abdi & Sadeghi, 2018;Wang & Yang, 2015).These findings indicate that authors in top journals tend to employ claiming centrality in their RAIs.The reason for these authors mostly employing this communicative step may be that presenting the significance of the current research topics may attract their audiences' attention significantly, particularly journal editors and reviewers.
The present findings may be also similar to earlier studies found in Indonesian accredited journal of applied linguistics (Samanhudi, 2017) and those in American and French RAIs (Helal, 2014) because all the data sets in these two earlier studies employed Move 1 of the CARS model.However, this claim is very weak because Move 1 of the CARS model has three possible steps, which they may not employ claiming centrality, but employ the other two communicative steps.Thus, although Move 1 appeared in all RAIs of earlier studies by Samanhudi (2017) and Helal (2014), their data do mean employing claiming centrality because they do not show explicitly whether they employ this step.
In contrast, the present findings are different from those found in the introduction section of the conference paper in the language and linguistics disciplines, which of twelve papers, only five of them employ claiming centrality (Anthony & Sajed, 2017).These findings also seem different from those found in Indonesian RAIs in that they rarely employed Move 1 of the CARS model (Adnan, 2009(Adnan, , 2011;;Arsyad, 2013;Mirahayuni, 2002), which also indicates rarely employing claiming centrality.This communicative step is optional in RAs in the English language teaching (ELT) discipline in Indonesia (Rochma et al., 2020), but the corpus-specific accreditation of this study is not clear whether they are accredited or not.This comparison implies that the authors in the current research findings consider presenting their current research topics as a significant strategy to promote their research and to attract their audiences' interests, and by doing so, their audiences may read their manuscript further.On the other hand, those that are different from the current research findings may also establish important knowledge backgrounds, but their purpose is not to justify their study.They prefer justifying their study by making subjective reasons, practical reasons, and local claims (Arsyad & Arono, 2016;Mirahayuni, 2002).By doing so, their research may create practical benefits, such as solving problems in the fields.
Regarding explicit research contribution, our data analysis results revealed that this communicative step is optional in both data sets.appearances tend to be in the conclusion section more than the other sections.The reason may be that authors in both data sets intend to show their research implication to their audiences that their research just been carried out has significant contributions.In this manner, however, Indonesian corpus (as shown in example 4 and 5) seems to show real world contribution, while international corpus (as exemplified in example 6) seems to show research world contribution.
Furthermore, as the present finding shows that this communicative strategy is optional in both data sets, it may not be too significant to promote research in this selected discipline.The reason for this rare employment may be that authors' target audiences may be experts and may understand their research significance, and thus, they do not mention their research contribution explicitly.

Syntactic Strategies for Promoting Research
Concerning syntactic strategy to express claiming centrality, both data sets tend to employ simple sentences more than the other sentence types.However, to express explicit research contribution, while Indonesian accredited journals still favored simple sentences, international preferred employing complex sentences.Thus, these syntactic findings imply that both data sets mostly favor expressing their research promotion in simple ways, except those of international journals in expressing research contribution.The reason for the difference is possibly that authors of Indonesian accredited journals intend their promotion more easily and comprehended that their current research has a significant contribution.In contrast, authors of reputable international journals may suppose that they need complex ways to express their research contribution for promoting their research.By doing so, they may assume that their research is interesting and may attract audiences' attention, particularly journal editors and reviewers.This finding is similar to those of my Ph.D. thesis (Warsidi, 2021) that Indonesian RAs in the History and Law disciplines tend to employ simple sentences.Besides, it is also similar to RAs in the social science discipline (Lu et al., 2020), and to realize communicative moves in applied linguistics article abstracts (Andika et al., 2018), which they also tend to use simple sentences.However, this present finding is different from those of Turkish and American research article sections as they mostly employ complex sentences (Deveci, 2019).Unfortunately, these comparisons are not equal, not comparing apple to apple, because the context of the present study is syntactic strategies to promote research, particularly focusing on claiming centrality and research contribution, while these studies in the literature focus on syntactic strategies in one section, some others on whole RA sections, and different disciplinary RAs.Thus, this comparison does not represent equally.

CONCLUSION
After analyzing 94 English RAs in the applied linguistics discipline published in reputable international journals and Indonesian accredited journals, reporting them, and discussing them with literature, I finally conclude that both data sets employed both claiming centrality and research contribution for promoting their research.However, the appearance of claiming centrality is more dominant than research contribution, in which claiming centrality is conventional in both data sets while presenting explicit research contribution is optional in both data groups.Then, both data sets have differences in employing these communicative strategies for promoting research, but their difference is not significant.To express claiming centrality, both data sets tend to communicate it in simple way more than the other ways.However, to express explicit research contribution, while authors of Indonesian accredited journals still tend to employ simple ways, authors of reputable international journals tend to employ complex ways.
This study theoretically strengthens the claim that genre is very dependent on specific standard criteria of a discourse community.The present finding is evidence that because the standard of both data sets is similar (both are in English, and well and high-standard journals), genre of international journals and Indonesian well-accredited journals has similarities when promoting their research; both of them tend to employ claiming centrality more than presenting explicit research contribution.Practically, it may significantly draw to pedagogical contribution for designing teaching materials for academic purposes, particularly for publishing purposes.
Unfortunately, this study has a limitation, only analyzing claiming centrality and research contribution for promoting research, while it ignores some more communicative strategies for promoting research.Because of this limited scope, further studies on promoting research that are uncovered in

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Research contributions to promote RAs