A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Introductions In Primary And Secondary Research Articles

In the last three decades the field of genre analysis has attracted linguists' attentions, who have studied different kinds of discourses by adopting genre analysis. As an opening part of English research articles (RAs), introduction section contains three moves. Whether the author can provide an excellent introduction or not has great impact on whether the paper can be published in a high-quality journal.Linguists have done some research on it in the relevant aspects. However, so far rare contrastive studies on the discoursal level have been carried out between the primary research article and secondary research article introductions.This research aims to explore the similarities and the differences of the introductions between the two types of research articles on the discoursal level from two aspects: graphological features and structural features.To carry out the research, the writer establishes two corpora PRAC (primary research articles corpus) and SRAC (secondary research articles corpus) consisting 20 introductions (around 183,729 words in total) from the journals named Applied Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes.Graphologically, article length and introduction length are the parameters to be under statistics. Generally, in each introduction, the total number of a certain parameter is counted, with its proportion and average being calculated. In order to further dig into the similarities and the differences between these two corpora, the independent T-test is used to verify whether the statistical difference is significant enough to distinguish primary and secondary features from each other in RAs. Structurally, the macro- and micro-structures are analyzed by adopting Swales' CARS model (Created a Research Space) and Swales' Move-step model respectively. Through the two-level discussions, we conclude that there are differences exist in the introduction length on graphological level. It is also found that there is a difference on macro-structures and many differences on micro-structures between PRA and SRA introductions.