Research article introductions in Chinese and English: A comparative genre-based study

Abstract

This study investigates the rhetorical organisation of the introduction section of English and Chinese research articles in the field of educational psychology using Swales’s (1990 & 2004) framework of move analysis. A corpus of 40 research articles, 20 Chinese and 20 English was selected. The English research articles, written by first language English speakers, were selected from The Journal of Educational Psychology while the Chinese research articles, written by first-language Chinese speakers, were selected from 心理发展与教育 (Psychological Development and Education). The first part of this study delineates the rhetorical patterns of the selected English and Chinese research article introductions. The second part is a contrastive rhetorical study of the two sets of introductions. This study demonstrates that the two sets of RA introductions (English and Chinese) support Swales’s general framework by employing the three moves (i.e. Move 1, Move 2 and Move 3) he outlined. However, the introductions contain particular rhetorical strategies (steps) which cannot be accounted for in terms of Swales’s CARS model. This study found both similarities and differences in the rhetorical patterns used in the two sets of introductions. The similarities are seen in the global organisation of the two sets of introductions, and the differences are in the degree to which the moves and rhetorical steps are used. This study attributes the rhetorical similarities to the influence of English as an international language on publications in China. It ascribes the rhetorical differences partially to membership of a specific discourse community but mainly to potential cultural influences. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications. It proposes that an analytic-synthetic approach be used to teach academic writing to Chinese ESL students, encouraging them to engage in genre analysis tasks before doing their own writing. As a result, knowledge gained from these tasks becomes a resource for students, enabling them to write coherent academic prose in English. The findings also suggest academic writing strategies for professional scientists wanting to publish in research literature.