behnaz hosseingholipour

Writing effective and persuasive manuscripts for submission to the high-indexed Iranian and international English-medium journals for the purpose of publication deserves having to-the-point knowledge and proficiency, which the Non-Native English writers of the non-English speaking countries seem to be lacking. Therefore, researchers need to identify problems and challenges that the group of writers encounter in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP). Therefore, this study aims to identify the ERPP needs of the Physical Education Ph.D. students and writers. Hence, interviews were conducted with a group of Physical Education content experts and Ph.D. students to identify the writers’ problems and challenges. The interviews were tape recorded as the participants had already been informed of the recordings and research aim. The tape recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in the thematic analysis and the grounded theory methods. The data analysis came up with four major themes (gained in the selective coding stage), 20 sub-themes (gained in the axial coding stage) and 83 themes (gained in the initial/open coding stage). The four major themes were `problem with language,’ `problem with content,’ `problem with journals,’ and `the demotivating factors.’ The fourth major theme, i.e., `the demotivating factors’, consisted of the sub-heading the technological illiteracy problem, which should be regarded as the novelty feature of this paper. The research is useful for material designers and instructors of the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) and others to offer tailor-made education to the tertiary level Physical Education students.

Abstract Publication in the Anglophone-dominant journals in the Education Internationalization Age is highly challenging for non-native writers, making it for instructors of the English for Academic Purposes and English for Research Publication Purposes inevitable to enhance the authors’ ability by informing them of the latest variations in research articles and their highly important part (abstract), caused by English as a Lingua Franca for Academia. To identify the rhetorical-linguistic variations in abstracts of two Physical Education sub-disciplines in the English as a Lingua Franca for Academia contexts, 120 Research Article Abstracts (60 in Sports Medicine and 60 in Sports Management) were randomly selected from six distinguished journals in Iran, India and America, that fall within Kachru’s (1985) Three-Circle (Expanding, Outer and Inner) World Englishes Model. The abstracts underwent analyses of move structure, using Hyland’s (2000) I-P-M-R-C model, and lexico-grammatical features. Results showed Move 3, I-P-M-R-C and `study’ were the most dominant move, move pattern and lexis, respectively, also highlighting move hybrids, repetitions, omissions and dispositions. The Expanding and Inner circle writers were highly homogeneous and closer than the Outer circle ones. This study has pedagogical implications for the Academic Writing and Research Publishing instructors, helping them design courses and tasks more insightfully. Keywords: Abstract, ELFA, Moves, Sports, Publication