Applied Linguistics Research Article Introduction Sections: Grammatical Metaphor as a Powerful Membership Status Index (Research Paper)

Recently, comparative investigations of academic Research Articles (RAs) between native and non-native writers of English have been the scene of considerable debate. This may translate into insider norm knowledge to help non-native academic writers approximate the native speaker’s generic conventions of academic delivery. In this spirit, Halliday’s notion of Grammatical Metaphor (GM) was used in this study to compare the introduction sections of Applied Linguistics RAs by Iranian and native speaker academic writers in Applied Linguistics. A random sampling was conducted to arrive at twenty-five RAs written by Iranian writers, and twenty-five by native speaker ones. The introduction sections of these RAs were analyzed synchronically using Halliday’s types of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor. The article-to-article comparison data pointed to no significant statistical difference between the Iranian and native speaker writers’ deployment of Ideational GM in the introduction sections of the selected RAs, although in the overall number of types of GM used, the difference was significant. The results show that in a 13-cells (100.0%) scheme, expected frequencies lie below 5, where the minimum expected cell frequency is 1.0. As such, based on significant level (1.0<5), the difference was statistically significant (100.0%) scheme, expected frequencies lie below 5, where the minimum expected cell frequency is 1.0. As such, based on significant level (1.0<5), the difference was statistically significant.The findings of this research might be helpful for curriculum developers and syllabus designers, by way of a need for the inclusion of suitable writing instruction practices and norms which could not only familiarize EFL students with academic and scientific writing conventions, but work also to increase their awareness about the real lexicogrammatical and syntactic dimensions of re-mapping that powerful semantic and systemic processes like GM trigger at the level of the clause.