A Genre Analysis Study On Academic Introduction Writing In Chinese And Its Pedagogical Applications

Academic writing is a compulsive task for college students to learn and study in their research field.Nowadays,the number of international students in China has been continuously growing,however,there seems to be a lack of standards in academic writing and related research in colleges and universities.It is not only a challenge for students,but also a problem for university teachers that international students write research articles in a non-native language.In order to help both Chinese and foreign students who major in TCSOL(Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages)to write research articles in Chinese,and provide teachers with teaching materials,this study takes the introduction of several academic journals as research object..It summarizes the characteristics of writing in the introduction section,and applies the results to classroom teaching.The corpus consists of random samples of 30 research articles that were published from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2018.There are respectively 10 in each of the following three important journals,namely Chinese Teaching in the World,Language Teaching and Linguistic Studies,and TCSOL Studies.Using the method of genre analysis(Swales,1900)in studies on English discourse,this paper initially reveals the organization of the introduction at macro level.Secondly it will analyze the linguistic features of the introduction at the microscopic level.Thus it can be found out how the authors organize the text and communicate with the target readers to make a meaningful discourse.Finally this paper attempts to design possible teaching material for writing the introduction parts of research papers in Chinese.A new model,which is proposed by this study,shows the introduction part comprises three Moves.Specifically,there are three steps in the first Move,namely Claiming centrality,Making topic generalization(s),and Reviewing items of previous research.In the second Move,there are three alternative steps,including Indicating a gap,Question-raising and Counter-claiming.The third Move involves more steps(Announcing present research,Outlining purposes,Indicating RA structure,Announcing principal findings,and Indicating the research methods).Compared with the CARS model proposed by Swales(1990),the structure of introduction in Chinese discourse is different.For example,first,providing background knowledge is an additional Move,which could provide readers with related concepts and additional information.Second,there are common sentence patterns,formal written language,and discourse markers that indicate the author’s emotional attitude in introduction parts.The results at both macro and micro levels are applied in the teaching materials,which could be used as reference for teachers,and might even lead to future research.