A Genre Analysis Of Methods In English Experimental Research Articles On Engineering

Methods,as the basic and important component of scientific papers,is to recount the research processes in detail and to show readers ways of data collection and data analysis to pave the way for relevant scholars to verify and repeat experiments.At present,genre studies at home and abroad focus more on such sections of research articles(RAs)as Abstract,Introduction,Results and Discussion.While some works have been done on Methods especially in Applied Linguistics,little attention has been paid to the genre analysis of experimental RAs Methods in the field of engineering,so its genre is worth probing into.As Mechanical Engineering is a fundamental discipline and Biomedical Engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary discipline in engineering field,this paper reports on an analysis of English experimental RAs Methods from these two disciplines,selecting 60 experimental RAs Methods from leading journals in the field of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering published from 2015 to 2017 in SCI to set up two corpora separately.This paper,based on genre analysis theory,is to explore macro-generic structure and micro-linguistic features of Methods and to clarify similarities and differences between them as well as the reasons why they occur by analyzing the experimental Methods in these two disciplines to further reveal its textual organization in engineering field and uniqueness of Methods in different disciplines.The major findings are as follows: 1)In terms of macro-generic structure,a revised Methods model was established in the pilot study,including 3 moves(M1,M2 and M3)and 11 steps(see Table 1).In this model,Methods in these two disciplines tend to realize communicative purposes through 3 different moves.In Mechanical Engineering,it is found that M1 and M2 are obligatory moves while M3 is conventional.M1-step 1 and step 2,M2-step 1 and step 3,and M3-step 2 are for communicative purposes.While in Biomedical Engineering,these three moves are obligatory and achieve communicative functions for all the steps with frequencies over 60%.This study also found that some steps showed distinct features related todisciplines in two corpora such as the M1-step 2 and step 4,M2-step 2,and M3-step 1and step 4 in Biomedical Engineering,while M2-step 3 in Mechanical Engineering.2)In terms of micro-linguistic features,the percentage of the length of total Methods to that of total RAs in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering is 30.5 and20.5 respectively.The average number of sentences in Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering is 53.2 and 33.47,and average length of sentence is 25.4 and 24.7.Besides,the sentence styles and lexical diversity in two corpora are in good agreement.For the use of tenses and voices,research found that the simple past and passive voice are widely used in Mechanical Engineering.However,Methods in Biomedical Engineering tends to use simple past tense but passive voice in M2 and M3,active in M1.A conclusion can be drawn that at macro-generic structure level,there is no significant difference at moves level in two engineering disciplines and move frequencies may vary from one discipline to another,but some steps have significant differences at steps level,showing distinct features related to disciplines such as describing the size of subject;recounting experimental process and indicating the standard of statistical significance and so on.At micro-linguistic features level,Methods in experimental RAs in two engineering disciplines inclines to choose the simple past tense and passive voice,and the number of words and average sentences as well as the use of voice in Methods are all influenced by disciplines.The results of analysis reveal English experimental RAs Methods in the field of engineering presents typical generic characteristics and shows distinct features related to disciplines,having some important implications for genre studies on RAs Methods and teaching of RAs Methods writing in this field.Therefore,in the process of teaching,teachers should pay attention to cultivating students' awareness of textual organization of individual discipline.