A Contrastive Study Of The Thematic Progression Patterns Of Chinese And English RAs

Research articles (RA), the major form to publish scholars' research findings, occupy a central place in the set of research-process genres. English, as the most important international language, plays a vital role in the academic and research settings. In China, an increasing attention has been drawn in recent years to the teaching and learning of academic writing in English. Studies on the RA start in the 1970s; many scholars, represented by Swales, find that the structure of most of the RA follows the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) format and that the four sections are quite different in terms of grammatical and structural features. In recent years, the grammatical features, such as tense, voice, nominalization, that-clause, etc, of the RA sections have been intensively studies; however, studies on the thematic progression pattern (TP Pattern), the micro-structure, of the RA sections are still lacking.In this paper, 32 Chinese and 32 English RAs were selected from major academic journals published in 2008 and the TP Patterns of each RA were examined. The IMRD were treated separately and the frequency of TP Pattern-use in each section was compared and contrasted between Chinese and English RAs. The results show that similarities and differences both exist. The main findings are stated as follows. In Introduction and Discussion sections, Parallel and Linear are the main patterns used in both Chinese and English RAs; Crossing pattern mainly exists in Chinese RAs while Constant pattern in English RAs. In Method section, Parallel is the main pattern in Chinese RAs while Constant in English RAs. In Results section, Parallel and Constant are the dominant patterns in both Chinese and English RAs; Linear pattern occurs often only in English RAs.