According to Swales (1990), the main purpose of genre studies is to raise awareness about the prototypical structure of academic texts. After the instruction of genre analysis, it was supposed that some changes might happen in the academic writing. This genre impact/awareness was examined in different studies. Along with the studies done, this study tended to examine the sectioning patterns of the Applied Linguistics research articles (RAs) over 40 years of publication and evidenced the possible changes. With a corpus of 1366 RAs, it was found that sectioning patterns of the RAs was evolved through the years (from 11.35% in 1976-1985 to 70.18% in 2006-2015. These changes could be related to the contributions of genre analysis and its integration into language teaching regulations. Therefore, genre analysis is shown to be a promising field for attention in the Applied Linguistics areas of investigation.
