Specialized Scholarly Writing in Applied Linguistics Research Proposals: a Corpus-Based Study.

This research aims to explore the nature of academic writing in the research proposals submitted to the Department of Applied Linguistics of the Institute of Arabic Language Teaching at Imam Muhammad Bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh. This research used corpus-based methodology to study the 100 most frequently used words in these research proposals, as well as keyword analysis of the proposals as a whole and for each of their sections. The most common collocations were also studied, together with the academic words used in them. The results of the study confirmed previous studies that indicated the size of the hundred most common words to the size of the corpus more than half, which only exist in very specialized corpora, and that the content words and the most common collocations indicate to a great extent the field of specialization, showing that these proposals followed scientific writing through the use of verbal nouns and the predominance of nouns. In addition, the number of academic words is 416 in the research proposal (56%). The study also confirmed the usage of scholars' names in Arabic scientific academic writing. This research recommends the study of proposals and research, both in the field of applied linguistics and other scientific and academic fields. This study equally confirmed that scientific writing in general contains a diversity of general language variations, and that each type of scientific writing is a sub-category within the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]