| The analysis of scientific writing can provide valuable insights into genre differences and thus function as an important tool for teachers of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), for materials writers, and for those who need to write in English. Studies on audience adaptation, necessitated by an author presenting essentially the same information for different readerships, have been scarce and often unsystematic. The present study overcomes these problems by systematically selecting texts from two different genres, research articles and their popularizations, and by borrowing from three important approaches to text analysis--frequency analyses of the 1960s, the rhetorical/grammatical approach of the 1970s and 1980s (Trimble 1985), and the multifeature/multidimensional approach recently proposed by Biber (1988).;Six pairs of texts from six scientific academic disciplines (medicine, zoology, geology, biology, astrophysics, and antiquity) were examined in terms of thirteen textual and ten extratextual features, based on previous studies in which only individual features in texts of one or mixed genres were considered. The textual features are tense choice, voice, nominalizations, type of subject, sequence signals, cohesive devices, demonstrative noun phrases, hedging devices, preciseness of vocabulary, vocabulary/lexis, definitions, relative clauses and reduced relative clauses, and that-complements. The extratextual features include sentence length, sentence types, titles, review of literature, source citations, illustrations, structure/organization of the text, function of introductory section, place of focal statement, and sequence of information.;The results indicate that the differences between research articles and their popularizations are quite obvious in the extratextual features. Differences in textual features exist, but are more subtle and allow both genres to be considered as instances of the same text type, scientific writing. The findings have clear implications for the ESP classroom if second language learners of English are to be adequately prepared for the comprehension and production of genre-specific discourse. |
