A Comparative Study Of The Moves Of Chinese And International English-Mediated Empirical Research Article Discussion Sections

Research article discussion section(DS)is important,owing to its essential role in emphasizing the significance of the research findings.However,DS writing is difficult,as it needs the writers to not only refer back to or evaluate the specific existing research,but also take a broad look at the research results and the study as a whole.The importance of DS and the difficulties of DS writing make the study of the DS a hot topic for decades.Employing move analysis,numerous studies on DS have explored the move organizations of DS,and the linguistic realizations of DS moves.However,there is still no consensus on the move sequence of DS nor the cyclic feature of DS moves has been sufficiently discussed.Besides,the linguistic realizations of DS moves have rarely been studied combing corpus analysis.Most important of all,the exploration of the writing differences of DS between local and international journals is still out of focus.To address these problems,employing a corpus facilitated move analysis method,the present study explored the move organizations of DS and the typical phrase-frames in DS moves written by two academic writer groups.The corpora used in this comparative study were Chinese empirical research article discussion section corpus(CRDC),and international empirical research article discussion section corpus(IRDC),which were composed of discussion sections from Chinese and international English-mediated journals of linguistics and medicine published from the year 2012 to 2017.Common corpus tools and self-designed computer program were employed in data processing.Results showed differences and similarities in the two corpora.With regard to the move organizations of DS,firstly,it was found that discussion sections in CRDC and IRDC were generally realized by a list of seven-move sequence: move 1-Background information,move 2-Summarizing results,move 3-Reporting the result(s),move 4-Commenting on the result(s),move 5-Summarizing the study,move 6-Evaluating the study and move 7-Deductions from the research.Secondly,move 4 was generally realized by three optional steps,i.e.step 1-Explaining,step 2-Comparing and step 3-Evaluating.Thirdly,move 1,move 3,and move 4 were three obligatory moves,and the other four moves were optional moves in the two corpora.Fourthly,three most frequent move cycles in both corpora were move 1 + move 3,move 1 + move 3 + move 4,and move 3 + move 4.However,Chinese writers preferred to firstly introduce the background information in the process of research results discussion,while international writers preferred to directly report the results.International writers had a much stronger tendency to use the move-step sequence,Result-Evaluating Sequence,than Chinese writers did.As for the linguistic realizations of DS moves,shared typical phrase-frames were found in Chinese and international DS moves,but about half of typical phrase-frames occurred exclusively in Chinese DS moves or international DS moves.The main functional categories of phrase-frames in Chinese and international DS moves were the same.Both Chinese and international writers preferred research-oriented phrase-frames in move 1,text-oriented phrase-frames in move 2 and step 2,and participant-oriented phrase-frames in step 1 and step 3.In brief,although the similarities were found between Chinese and international DS writing in terms of move organizations and move-specific phrase-frames,the differences between Chinese and international DS writing were significant.It may imply that there exist different writing norms between Chinese and international academic communities.The findings of the present study may provide a useful resource for materials in teaching English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes.