genre analysis, acknowledgements, SciELF corpus, genre moves, steps, academic discourse, native speakers, non-native speakers

This paper focuses on the genre of acknowledgements in the SciELF corpus, which is a corpus of second-language use in written scientific communication. This paper looks into the instances of the genre, where the researchers can express their thanks to sponsors and funding institutions, or gratitude to research collaborators, and tries to find out how acknowledging acts are constructed particularly in ELF interaction. The paper considers textual practices that enable researchers express their thanks with the help of a genre analysis model for acknowledgement sections. The findings show that there exists the variation between the hard and social sciences and there is a strong correlation of acknowledgements by native speakers of English with the SciELF texts by non-native speakers of English.