The research article’s text plan: characterization and didactic perspectives

ABSTRACT This paper’s goal is to describe the text plans’ main properties of four research articles produced within different areas (Sciences vs. Social and Human Sciences/Humanities), in order to apply the results in genre teaching, within the fields of academic literacy and genre pedagogy. The adopted theoretical framework includes Sociodiscoursive Interactionism main assumptions (Bronckart [1997] 1999, 2010), French language school Text Linguistics’ proposals (Adam 2001), and Genre Didactic main principles (Schneuwly e Dolz 2004; Dolz e Gagnon 2008; Dolz 2011). A top-down approach was adopted, including a qualitative-descriptive analysis. It focused on four texts of the genre research article, which were produced within different disciplinary areas. Analyzed data show a significant flexibility of the research articles’ text plans. Several adaptations were identified, which seem to be due to the research field within which each text was produced, namely to their typical discourse practices.