A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Experimental Research Articles In English Academic Journals

As an important media of displaying and communicating the forefront achievements in the field of science,experimental research articles have recently received much attention in the international academic circle with their featured scientific research methods and practical application value.Therefore,the exploration of the generic structure in experimental research articles becomes very crucial.In the past three decades,the application of genre analysis theory has infused new ideas into discourse analysis,and has gradually become an important approach of analyzing the communicative purpose and language use strategies of texts.At present,genre studies in domestic academic circle are mostly focused on research articles in Applies Linguistics field,rather than in science field.As Medicine and Mechanical Engineering are two representative and fundamental disciplines in the field of hard science,this research will analyze the generic structure of research articles in the two fields,which aims to provide some prototypes for experimental research articles writing,so as to help students in related fields better equipped with the textual organization skills and writing techniques of experimental research articles.The research selects 60 experimental research articles from leading journals in the field of Medicine and Mechanical Engineering that are published in 2015-2017 in SCI,and puts them into two corpora.Based upon the theory of genre analysis,this research makes a contrastive analysis on the overall generic structure of the 60 selected experimental research articles the and the move-step structure of Introduction section,Method section,Results and Discussion section in these articles.The specific research questions includes three aspects:(1)Are there any differences in the overall generic structure of experimental research articles between the two corpora?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the generic structure of the three main sections between the two corpora?(3)What are the possible reasons for these differences in the generic structure between the two corpora?The major research findings are presented as follows:(1)Through analysis of the overall generic structure,it is found that the Conclusion section also presents somegeneric and common feature in the two corpora,except for Swales' s(1990)four fundamental sections,as Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion.Some Mechanical Engineering experimental research articles also have several unexpected sections,as Background,Theoretical Model,Experimental Implementation and so on.On the whole,it is found that the generic structure of experimental research articles in Medicine presents more uniform and regular feature than that in Mechanical Engineering.(2)Through detailed analysis of introduction sections with Swales' s CARS(1990)model,it is found that Move 1 and Move 3 are obligatory moves,Move 2 is a conventional move.In terms of the realization steps of the three moves,most articles choose step 1b to realize the communicative function of Move 2.Furthermore,step 2and step 3 in Move 3 present significant differences according to the data analysis by SPSS 19.0 software.Thorough analysis of method sections,it is found that the communicative function of this section is realized by three different moves.Among the three moves,the frequency of step 2 and step 4 in Move 1,step 1 and step 3 in Move 3show significant differences between the two corpora.Based on Dudley-Evans' s(1994)Nine-Move model for results and discussion sections,it is found that there exists five moves with higher frequency in the two corpora: Statement of Results,Findings,Reference to Previous Research,Claim,and Limitation.(3)In regard to these differences in the overall generic structure and the three main sections of the 60 selected experimental research articles,three main possible reasons for these differences are concluded: different research content and methods of disciplines;different requirements of journals;distinctive writing habits and thinking patterns of writers.By conducting a comparative genre analysis of experimental research articles in the two disciplines,this study aims to enrich the theory of genre analysis by its application in some specific disciplines,and offer some enlightenment for genre analysis of the same genre,which would be beneficial both for the research of genre analysis and the teaching of English academic writing.