Promotion in Academic Discourse: Authors’ Centrality Claims in Their Research Article Introductions

Centrality claims in the introduction part of a research article are aimed at attracting readers’ attention towards the research topic to be discussed in the article. Readers will decide whether or not to continue reading the article if the appeal is effective and the claims of the importance and usefulness of the article are accepted. However, most studies investigate only the discourse patterns and linguistic features of article introductions without analyzing further how authors attract readers’ attention to the importance of their research topic. This study aimed at comparing the types of centrality claims found in the introductions of articles published in high-rank and low-rank international journals in Applied Linguistics. Forty articles chosen from four Scopus-indexed international journals in Applied Linguistics were used in this study. The results showed that on average every article used 3.65 appeals of different types. Two types of claims (appeal to salience and appeal to problematicity) are more frequently used by authors than the other two types of appeal (appeal to topicality and appeal to magnitude). The data also reveal that, although not significant, the journal ranking correlates with the frequency of appeals used in the introductions. It is suggested that authors in Applied Linguistics should use multiple types of appeals in their introduction to attract readers’ attention to their research topic so that they are willing to read the entire article.