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An expert audience gathered on Monday, February 13, 2017, as Hassan Costello and Professor Habib Abdesslem led an intellectually charged seminar, “Introductions in Locally Published Research Articles in Linguistics: Toward a Syntagmatics of Moves.” Hosted by the Language Research Center at the College of Languages and Translation, the session examined how writers craft the opening sections of scholarly articles—and why those openings matter.

Costello and Abdesslem traced the parallel histories of two cornerstones of academic writing: traditional sentence-level grammar and John Swales’s genre-focused rhetoric. Both, they argued, have journeyed from descriptive observation to prescriptive norm. Yet, the presenters maintained, continuous study of real-world language use—especially across cultures—strengthens those norms without stifling the natural dynamism of linguistic change.

Center stage was Swales’s widely cited Create-A-Research-Space (CARS) model. Drawing on research articles from two Saudi university journals, the speakers mapped out core and extended Move sequences—visual blueprints that show how effective introductions establish territory, identify a niche, and occupy that niche. Their recommendation to authors: follow the proven rhetorical progression in the CARS framework while remaining sensitive to local disciplinary conventions.

A spirited Q&A followed, joined remotely by colleagues at the King Abdullah Road Campus. Discussions ranged from cross-disciplinary adaptability of the model to potential refinements for Arabic-medium scholarship. Dr. Abdulkhaleq Al Qahtani, Vice Dean of Higher Studies, drew on insights from his doctoral dissertation at Oklahoma State University to propose avenues for future investigation.

The organizers extended thanks to Dean Dr. Abdullah Al-Melhi and Language Research Center Director Dr. Ismail Alrefaai for their unwavering support. The study will appear soon in the Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics (AJAL).