Criticality in applied linguistics literature reviews: a corpse-based contrastive study of expert and student writing

In academic writing, literature reviews play a crucial role in ensuring research quality, as they require writers to critically evaluate theories, claims, and propositions. However, many researchers especially student writers find this task challenging. In this study, criticality refers to how writers convey their evaluative stance toward reviewed literature through expressions of attitude and degrees of certainty or limitation, including personal evaluations and representations of knowledge status. This study investigates how expert and student writers express criticality in literature reviews within the field of applied linguistics. It examines the similarities and differences in their use of strategies, linguistic devices, and lexical bundles, and explores how these elements function in conveying criticality. The analysis involved two specialized corpora: one from literature reviews found in the introduction sections of published research articles in journals such as English for Academic Purposes, English for Specific Purposes, and Language and Communication (expert corpus) and the other from literature review chapters in master’s theses from three Malaysian universities: Universiti Teknologi MARA, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and Universiti Putra Malaysia (learner corpus). Using adaptation of several models and taxonomies, the linguistic devices and lexical bundles within the identified strategies were distinguished and analysed. The corpus-based contrastive study, conducted with Wordsmith Tools 6.0, revealed that both expert and student writers use five key strategies to express criticality: hedging, boosting, attitude markers, disclaim markers, and self-mentions. Expert writers demonstrated a higher frequency of these strategies, reflecting different preferences in word choice and lexical bundle variations. Both groups employed epistemic and attitudinal lexical bundles, predominantly four-word over five-word bundles. The expert corpus showed greater variation in lexical bundles, while the learner corpus revealed overuse of certain bundles, indicating limited expressive diversity. Notably, the Attitudinal-Desire sub-category was absent in both corpora, and the Epistemic-Personal sub-category was missing in the learner corpus. In the final phase, the analysis focused on identifying the functions of linguistic devices within lexical bundles and on those bundles containing these devices, particularly in their role as expressions of criticality in literature reviews. The findings highlighted several crucial functions of the five strategies for expressing criticality, demonstrating effective use of various linguistic devices and lexical bundles. This study highlights the value of a corpus-based contrastive approach in examining criticality in literature reviews of applied linguistics texts. By comparing expert and student writers, the analysis reveals significant differences and similarities in how criticality is constructed and articulated across the two groups. These findings contribute to both applied linguistics and academic writing research by advancing our understanding of learner language, and the strategies used to express criticality. Specifically, the study offers new insights into how Malaysian student writers show criticality in literature reviews and introduces an integrated framework for analysing such expressions, thereby enriching current work in stance and criticality studies.