Domination of Positivism in Academic Writing of Iranian Applied Linguists: A Critical Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Academic writing is one of the important skills in higher education and as a social phenomenon can be investigated for ideological manipulations. This study tries to unveil the westernized hegemonic discourse such as legitimation patterns in academic discourse of Iranian applied linguists in three major research paradigms. To this end, five-point classification of van Leeuwen’s (2008) authorization’s category was used as our analytic framework. The published articles of Iranian academic-scholarly journals were critically analyzed for the observed frequencies of the mentioned classifications and Chi-square tests were used to statistically investigate the associations between authorization’s patterns and research paradigms. The results revealed statistically significant associations between quantitative and qualitative research methods on one hand and between qualitative and mixed-methods on the other hand. Accordingly, the results of this study may shed some lights on the domination of positivist’s ideology in academic writing of the applied linguists in Iran. In this respect, the policy makers in the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, along with editorial boards of Iranian journals in the field of applied linguistics, may change the globalized and westernized view of education into more locally oriented approaches. Furthermore, professors and students may adopt more democratic views in their research and reporting studies.

Keywords

• positivism
• academic writing
• critical corpus-based approach
• hegemonic discourse
• domination