Graduate students submit academic papers at the end of the term as part of their coursework. Such papers contain introduction moves which may be troublesome and conclusion moves which may contain sub-moves not really required. This paper is aimed at assessing what particular moves are employed in the introduction and conclusion sections of 21 graduate research papers submitted in one leading university in Manila.  Ten of these were written by MA students while 11 were written by Ph.D. students.  The study employed the framework proposed by Swales and Feak (1994) pertaining to moves in research paper introductions and Yang and Allison’s (2003) framework for analyzing the conclusion section.

Findings revealed that in the Introduction section, all MA and PhD students employed Move 1 with majority employing 2-3 sub-moves. With regard to Move 2, 10 of the 21 papers employed the sub-move Indicating a gap; three employed the sub-move Counter-claiming; the rest did not employ any sub-move at all. With respect to Move 3, results showed that the most commonly used sub-moves were Outlining purposes and Announcing present research. Finally with regard to the Conclusion section, most writers employed Moves 1, 3 and 2, in that order. However, the sub-move Evaluating methodology was not at all utilized as part of Move 2.