A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of English Research Articles On Material Engineering By Native Chinese Writers And Native English Writers

English research articles play an important role in presenting the newly scientific achievements. It is essential to improve the quality of research articles as the high-quality research articles could promote academic communication among different countries. Through reviewing the studies on research articles over the last decade, it can be observed that linguists gradually transfer their focuses from linguistic perspective to discourse perspective. Furthermore, the introduction of genre provides a new approach for the analysis of English research articles. Currently, the empirical researches on genre analysis of research articles in domestic are focused on the analysis of a particular section of research articles such as Abstract, Introduction, Method and Discussion. However, there have been few studies on genre analysis of the whole research articles from the contrastive perspective.This thesis begins with collecting research texts. These 40 research articles are randomly selected from leading journals in the field of Material Engineering covering 2013-2015 in Science Citation Index. They fall into two corpora: One consists of 20 English research articles written by native Chinese writers; the other is composed of another twenty written by native English writers. The study employs the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to probe into differences of the overall generic structures of research articles and move-step structure of Introduction sections, Experimental sections,(Results and Discussion) sections in research articles written by native Chinese writers and native English writers.The specific research questions are as follows:1. What are the overall generic structures of English research articles on Material Engineering written by native English writers and native Chinese writers? Are there differences of the overall generic structures of English research articles written by native English writers and Chinese writers?2. Are there differences in the three main sections of the 40 selected research articles in terms of move-step structure?3. If there are some differences, what are the possible reasons for these?The major research findings are presented as follows:(1) The results indicate that being different from the IMRD model, the overall generic structure of the selected research articles is Introduction-Experimental-(Results and Discussion)-Conclusion. Besides, an unexpected research finding in Conclusion section can be presented as follows: on the one hand, those written by native Chinese writers exhibit principal findings and argumentation; on the other hand, those of native English writers delve on research results and principal application of the findings.(2) Through exploration of Introduction sections of the collected research articles written by native Chinese writers and native English writers, the percentage of Move 2 in Introductions of research articles by native Chinese writers is lower than that by native English writers in light of the occurrence of frequency. Additionally, there are significant differences in Step 1a and Step 2 of Move 3 in Introduction sections of English research articles written by Chinese writer and native English writers; through investigations of research materials, there are no significant differences of generic structure in the Experimental sections in research articles of both corpora in terms of move and step level; after analyzing the research materials, it can be deduced that there are no differences in terms of the occurrence percentage of moves in Results and Discussion section of research articles written by native Chinese writer and native English writers. But as for the content of each move in Results and Discussion section, it is noteworthy that Chinese writers prefer to construct Move1 by restating purpose of the research, while native English writers are likely to refer to previous research results to occupy Move1.(3) The different ways of textual construction may be resulted by variety of reasons: different levels of genre awareness; long-established writing habits; distinctive thinking patterns.This study has a positive impact on academic English writing. Some constructive suggestions are offered from the perspective of genre analysis on the writing and teaching of English research articles.