A Study On The Genre Of Chinese And English Research Article Introductions

Language is a cultural phenomenon. As a consequence, each language has rhetorical conventions unique to it. There are different rhetorical structures in writing across languages and cultures. The field of contrastive rhetoric investigates rhetorical structures across languages with the goal of predicting the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a foreign language. Since its inception in 1966 by Kaplan, contrastive rhetoric has developed as a theory and research approach employed to examine texts across languages and cultures. With the development of other disciplines, such as discourse analysis, text linguistics, contrastive rhetoric studies expands to various genres of writing, such as journal articles, business reports and academic writing, not limited to previous student composition research.Much of the previous research has mainly dealt with expository writing. Despite a variety of contrastive rhetoric studies, fewer researchers have focused on the genre of research article introductions in the previous research. The genre of research article introductions exhibits various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style as well as function. Although the introduction has certain generic structure, social and cultural factors probably constrain the realizational patterns of certain genre.This study examines the genre of research article introductions across languages, with the aim to explore different rhetorical structures and linguistic features in the Chinese and English research article introductions. For the purpose of investigation, an English corpus and a Chinese corpus are built respectively. The corpora for this study consists of forty research article introductions selected from Chinese and English academic journals. Swales' CARS model is employed for the data analysis. In the CARS model three moves are marked as establishing a territory, establishing a niche and occupying the niche. Each move is realized indifferent steps via its function. The present study makes a descriptive analysis of the Chinese and English introductions that are coded in terms of moves and steps in the CARS model. After the data analysis, what follows is the discussion of the results from the macro-structural and micro-linguistic perspectives. Significant differences are identified in Chinese and English research article introductions at the macro-structure level and at the micro-linguistic level in particular. Some tentative explanations are given for the varied rhetorical structures in the two corpora from the social and cultural perspectives between Chinese and English academic communities. This study ipso facto demonstrates that the generic structures vary across languages and cultures.Since the present study is an attempt to relate genre analysis with contrastive rhetoric studies, it is contributed to enrich contrastive rhetoric research. The findings of this study are significant for further research on contrastive rhetoric and shed much light on the application of genre-based pedagogy in second language writing as well. The present study also provides better insights into different rhetorical conventions of different languages and enhances our disciplinary and cultural awareness so as to advance the academic communication.