مهسا علی نسب

Lexical cohesion (LC) is an important index that could make a text scholarly and publishable. Despite the recognition of LC as a vital component of scholarly writing, the extent to which authors’ linguistic background might influence LC use has been rarely addressed. This paper was a novel attempt considering the effects of four linguistic backgrounds on LC negotiation in thesis literature reviews crafted by bilingual and multilingual graduate students in applied linguistics. The study selected 70 theses developed by multilingual Kurdish and Turkish and bilingual Farsi and Arabic MA and PhD students in applied linguistics. Two types of LC, namely local and global, each consisting of three indices of lemmas, synonyms, and content words, were considered for our thematic analysis. The corpus analysis showed that synonym congruity was the most commonly employed LC index, followed by lemmas and content words. The findings also revealed that multilingual Kurdish students used a higher number of LC indices, particularly in terms of global LC. The second group that ranked at the top involved multilingual Turkish writers who mainly relied on local LC. On the other hand, bilingual Farsi and Arabic students used a lower number of LC indicators compared to the other two. The study offers helpful insights for academic writing research and pedagogy.

The importance of incorporating graduate students' needs into academic writing courses has established a good reputation in EAP/ESP research. In addition, writing and publishing research articles (RA) is a universally established benchmark for students' academic flourish. The present study examines the status quo of academic writing courses in graduate programs to determine the extent academic writing needs of Applied Linguistics students, mainly RA writing needs, are addressed and practiced in the course. Drawing insights from the literature on academic writing, we developed two similar interview protocols for graduate students and course instructors to capture these key stakeholders' retrospective views on the course. We found that the course mainly focuses on proposal/thesis writing, not regarded as a critical need based on students' perspectives. Moreover, both students and instructors echoed the importance of RA writing as a significant area to be covered while emphasizing the need to integrate RA genre literacy into classroom practices. In this paper, we call for the reconsideration of students' primary needs in designing and running graduate writing programs and suggest that RA writing with a genre-based orientation become an instrumental component of academic writing courses in English as an Additional Language context (EAL).