Comparative Analysis Of Methods In English And Chinese Medical Research Articles

The main purpose for the research article Method is to make the readers get a clear idea about the research method and process of the article. By recounting the research processes, the author attempts to persuade the readers that the research was done according to the accepted norms and standards in order to strengthen the reliability of their Results. Therefore, Method is one of the key parts in research articles; however, the previous studies on genre analysis have paid little attention to it, let alone the contrastive study between English and Chinese Methods.This study aims to investigate the differences and similarities between the research article Methods written in English and those written in Chinese in medical area. 70 corpora were randomly selected from 5 representative international journals and 5 key domestic journals in medical field, and Swale's theory on genre analysis and statistical analysis method were adopted to conduct the contrastive analysis of move structures, graphological features, the use of citation in the English and Chinese Methods. At the same time, in order to help Chinese researchers know more about the linguistic features of English research article Methods, we also summarized the use of the passive voice, an important grammar point in the English Method writing.The results of this study show that there are similarities and differences between English and Chinese Methods, and they are summarized as follows.(1) On the level of move structure, since the communicative purposes are common, Chinese and English Methods largely share the same moves, i.e. Describing Data-Collection Procedures, Describing Research Procedures, and Describing Data-Analysis Procedures. However, there are some differences in the frequencies of occurrence of the steps that constitute them, especially the Move 1.3 and Move 2.1, where the criteria for data collection are indicated and the main research apparatus are identified. These differences may be mainly explained by the different language communities the authors are involved in;(2) In terms of graphological features, the total number of words in the English articles and Methods, as well as the number of sentences in the English articles are much more than those in the Chinese ones, and the statistical results show the difference on the length of the Method is not significant; however, due to the differences on these two languages themselves and the writing conventions in the two different language communities, there are significant differences between the English and Chinese articles on the number of sentence in the Methods as well as the percentage of the Method to the whole research article;(3) As for the use of citation, the difference between the English and Chinese Methods is statistically significant. The occurrence frequency of citation is higher in English articles than in Chinese ones, and this indicates the Chinese writers seldom use the researches done by other experts to confirm or improve the reliability of their researches;(4) In regarding to the use of the passive voice, due to the writing conventions, passive voice is still widely used in the English Methods, and past tense is frequently used.The differences on English and Chinese Methods can be attributed to the differences of the two kinds of language and the writing conventions in different language communities. By conducting a comparative analysis of the genre structure of research article Methods, this study would be beneficial both for genre analysis and teaching of academic writing.