Establishing a Niche: A Practical Guide to Identifying Linguistic Strategies

To many researchers, Research Article (RA) is a grand overarching and scholarly production in the academic life of a researcher. In this regard, Swales’s (1990) create a research space (CARS) model has been considered the most successful endeavor to identify the generic structure of an RA. Thesecond move in the revised model (Swales, 2004), establishing a niche, aims to offer a convincing argument in order to draw the attention of the audience and justify the significance of the study (Lim, 2012). This is shown by outlining a gap, adding to existing knowledge, and presenting justificationsfor the claims made in the study. Recently, however, researchers have questioned the validity and reliability of Swales’s model to successfully account for the rhetorical structure of an RA In this workshop, I attempt to show that Swales’s CARS model is too general in move two to explain the diversity involved in the RAs, and researchers establish the niches of their studies using more diverse sub-steps that are not predicted by the model