Contrastive Genre Analysis Of The Chinese And English Introduction Sections Of Research Articles In Applied Linguistics

Genre analysis is a conspicuous approach to textual analysis. It seeks to identify a "move" (a text section that has a communicative function). Swales'(1990) genre analysis has been successful in describing the rhetorical organization of introduction of academic research articles (RAs) and capturing linguistic features used to express communicative functions in different varieties of language use.This study has two main objectives of identifying what rhetorical moves are commonly used and how these moves are expressed linguistically by researchers in writing research article introductions in applied linguistics in English and in Chinese. The main procedures of this study are corpus compilation, move analysis at the macro and micro levels, and reliability analysis.The corpus consists of stratified random samples of 40 research articles representing the internationally prestigious four journals (English for Specific Purposes, Applied Linguistics, Language Teaching Research, and The Journal of Pragmatics) during the years 2007 and 2008 in applied linguistics based on the Social Sciences Citation Index (2007) and 40 research articles representing the domestically prestigious four journals (Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages, Journal of Foreign Languages, and Foreign Language Research during the years 2007 and 2008 in applied linguistics based on the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (2008) respectively.Move analysis was conducted on the introduction section of the research article corpus to identify the rhetorical organization of the corpus. The objectivity of moves was assessed by reliability analysis procedure.At the macro level, the move analysis in English and Chinese follows Swales' CARS model for article introductions (1990). Through analysis, the results revealed that in English, a 3-move structure in the introduction section of research articles proposed in Swales (1990)'analysis is approximately in agreement with the corpus in applied linguistics, though there exist some individual variations such as only two steps (Indicating a gap or Question raising) are used in Move 2 instead of four in Swales (1990)'analysis. And in Move 3, there is an additional move/step (Indicating research method). In Move 1, researchers adopted more Step 2s though Step 1 is more frequently used to open the section. Researchers in this study frequently cited other analysis and with critical ideas when reviewing previous works in order to present their own ideas. Compared with English corpus, Chinese has similar occurrences in Move 1 and Move 3 with the exception that in Chinese the writers use Move 3, Step 2 (Announcing principal findings) less frequently because they are not willing to discuss their finding in the introduction. However, there exist some individual variations in Move 2. In English only two steps (Indicating a gap or Question raising) are used but in Chinese Counter-claiming is also employed as a strategy. Also in Chinese, there is an additional Move termed Move 4 providing background information which adds additional information or clarification of definitions. Chinese writers cite more other analysis but with little critical ideas when reviewing previous works. This shows Chinese writers' politeness and humility.At the micro level, whether linguistic features used in the three moves are formulaic or not are discussed and how citations, reporting verbs and hedging are used are discussed at length. Contrasts are also made between English and Chinese and causes of differences are accounted for. English writers prefer to use non-integral citations while Chinese writers prefer to use both. This means that the use of citations is more language-specific than discipline-specific.The fact that English prefer to use emotionally involved expressions while Chinese prefer to use inanimate nouns like research indicates that Chinese scholars would like to write in an objective way while English researchers prefer to use subjective and open-minded approach.This study provides a basic template of the structure of RAs introduction in applied linguistics and identifies sets of linguistic features commonly used to express academic ideas. This body of knowledge facilitates advancements for prospective native and non-native English academic writers and readers as well as prospective native Chinese academic writers and readers.