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

Abstract

This study investigates the rhetorical organisation of English and Chinese research article introductions 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 心理發展與教育 ( Psychological Development and Education). The findings reveal that English and Chinese research article introductions generally employ the three moves (i.e., Move 1, Move 2 and Move 3) as outlined by Swales (1990, 2004). Swales’s Create a Research Space (CARS) model however, could not account for certain rhetorical strategies found in the two sets of introductions. English and Chinese research article introductions differ in the extent to which the moves and steps are used in the introductions. That is, generally speaking, the rhetorical moves and steps were employed in fewer Chinese introductions compared to the English. It is proposed that an analytic-synthetic approach can be used to teach academic writing to Chinese ESL students, encouraging them to engage in genre-analysis tasks before doing their own writing.