This quantitative-qualitative study aimed to fathom out whether and how informal features are exploited in articles of applied linguistics written in English by natives and non-natives. To this end, a corpus of 200 articles was compiled. We employed the classification of informal features proposed by Chang and Swales (1999) representing 10 informal features in academic writing. The AntConc software was used, along with manual search, to detect the informal features. The frequency, percentages, and the density per 1000 words of each informal feature were calculated. The results revealed that informal features are utilized more frequently in native articles than non-native ones, with no significant differences in the two corpora in terms of their most and least frequent informal features. Sentence initial conjunctions are the most recurrent informal features, while exclamation marks are employed the least frequently in both native and non-native articles . Implications for EAP courses are delineated in the study as well.

中文翻译：

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应用语言学研究文章中的非正式性：比较本土和非本土著作

这项定量定性研究旨在弄清楚本地人和非本地人在用英语撰写的应用语言学文章中是否以及如何利用非正式特征。为此，汇编了200篇文章的语料库。我们采用了由Chang和Swales（1999）提出的非正式特征分类，代表了学术写作中的10个非正式特征。AntConc软件与手动搜索一起用于检测非正式功能。计算每个非正式功能的频率，百分比和每1000个单词的密度。结果表明，非正式文章在本地文章中的使用频率要比非本地文章高，在两个语料库中，最频繁和最少的非正式特征方面没有显着差异。句子最初的连词是经常出现的非正式特征，而在本地和非本地文章中使用感叹号的频率最低。这项研究还对EAP课程的含义进行了描述。