Chinese And English Research Article Introductions In Business Management: A Contrastive Analysis

The past two decades have seen studies reporting structure of the research article (RA) developing into a legitimate field of research so fundamentally that the original research focusing on English academic texts has been expanded over the years to allow for the examination of the text structures generated by academics publishing in various other languages. As a result, the CARS (Create a Research Space) model, a widely recognized and frequently applied model for RA introductions (Swales, 1990), has aroused increasing interests and concerns among linguists especially EAP (English for Academic Purposes) practitioners.However, the ongoing discussions among members of the international discourse community have not yet fully addressed the question whether the model is sensitive enough to capture all the features of management research article introductions. Besides, it was necessary to fill another significant gap in the related literature where there has been little contrastive analysis of the Chinese-English RAs in the discipline of business management. This study, with two data-driven corpus composed of 40 Chinese RA introductions and 40 English ones from peer-reviewed journals, made a quantitive analysis of the data in terms of macro textual organization and micro linguistic expressions. The findings identified both the language-specific writing strategies and the discipline-specific generic features. A revised CARS model, therefore, in light of the identified generic features is proposed, seeking to offer Chinese writing instructors and practitioners in management discipline an insight into how internationally publishable RAs are written.