Furthering and applying move/step constructs: Technology-driven marshalling of Swalesian genre theory for EAP pedagogy

•A corpus of research articles was analyzed to devise and validate cross-disciplinary move/step IMRD frameworks.•The annotated corpus reveals both disciplinary patterns and intra/inter-disciplinary variation.•Linguistic descriptions inform applied natural language processing.•Computationally operationalized genre constructs are applied to discipline-specific AWE feedback.

John Swales' seminal work has inspired a wealth of research with important pedagogical implications for genre-based writing instruction. Continuing the prolific move analysis tradition in EAP research, this article presents empirically devised and validated cross-disciplinary IMRD move/step frameworks for the research article genre and demonstrates how Swales' move and step concepts underlying these frameworks formed the foundation of innovative genre-based automated writing evaluation technology. Overall, this paper makes the relationships between genre theory, genre analysis, and genre instruction explicit, demonstrating that move analysis is a powerful and promising theoretical, analytic, and teaching construct. With that, we take Swales' vision to a new dimension of conceptualizing EAP.