| In the academic writing,the literature review part in Introductions mainly demonstrates previous and current researches,figures out the gap and introduces the present research.It should be noted that in the literature review part of Introductions,writers are not only supposed to briefly describe previous studies and then lead in the present research,but also to make evaluation on the them and highlight the present research.In this process,the construction of criticality is of great importance.Recently,a great number of studies have been conducted on the disciplinary differences of the expressions of criticality in academic writing;however,most of them employ one-fold research methods and start from a higher-level perspective,while the lower-level investigation on internal organization of statements are sometimes ignored.In the present research,the author randomly selects the Introduction parts in journals with high impact factors,in which are 30 texts of Education(ED)and 30 of Mechanical Engineering(ME).Then,based on Bruce's social/cognitive genre model(2008),a contrastive study is conducted on the literature review part in Introductions.To be more specific,firstly,the literature review parts in Introductions will be picked out according to Swales CARS Model(1990)and then the corpus will be built.Next,Hyland's(2005)metadiscourse devices,included in social/cognitive genre model,will be applied.The features of the use of metadiscourse devices in texts of both Education and Mechanical Engineering will be recorded,analyzed and compared.Lastly,on the basis of the analysis on metadiscourse devices,the statements that express criticality will be extracted,and the internal organization will be further discussed with the help of Crombie's(1985)Interpropositional relations.The similarities and differences of the internal structures of critical statements in texts of two disciplines will then be observed from a lower-level perspective.The research questions are listed as follows:1.What are the features of metadiscourse devices in texts of education and mechanical engineering?2.What are the features of interpropositional relations in the critical statements(that contain items of metadiscourse devices)in both disciplines?3.What are the similarities and differences of the use of metadiscourse devices and interpropositional relations between texts of the two disciplines? What may be the reasons for them?Major findings of the present research are:1.There are more interactional metadiscourse devices in the texts of ED,especially hedges,boosters and attitude markers.While there are more interactive metadiscourse devices in the texts of ME,represented by items like transition markers and frame markers.2.The interpropositional relations in texts of ED mainly belong to the categories of Report and Discussion;while in texts of ME,the interpropositional relations are mainly included in Logico-deductive,Explanation and Discussion.3.Metadiscourse devices are frequently used in texts of both disciplines.However,in texts of Mechanical Engineering,the amount of Interactive metadiscourse is higher than that of Education;in contrast,the amount of Interactional metadiscourse in texts of Education is higher than that of Mechanical Engineering.It implies that texts of Education put more emphasis on the interaction between writers and readers,while texts of Mechanical Engineering tend to ensure the fluency and structure of the discourse.Through the research on critical statements,the author finds that interpropositional relations in texts of Mechanical Engineering are mainly categorized as Logico-deductive,Explanation and Discussion,which take up a lower percentage in texts of Education.It indicates that when constructing the internal organization of critical statements,scholars in the two disciplines have different conventions.The reasons for those differences might be the differences of characteristics of disciplines and the language styles.The author conducts a comparative study on conventions of academic writing of Education and Mechanical Engineering,from the perspectives of both higher-and lower-level(with the use of metadiscourse devices and interpropositional relations).The similarities and differences of the construction of criticality of the two disciplines are found. |
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