A Comparative Study Of Introduction Section Of Research Articles In Chinese And International English Periodicals

With the development of science and technology, more and more English academic periodicals are issued in China. These English Periodicals play an important role in exhibiting to the world the latest theories and findings in China. Nowadays, it is estimated that there are more than 186 CEPs in China. Among them, only 36 periodicals are listed by SCI and EI, which means that Chinese academic periodicals can not keep up with the international English periodicals. The most important reason is that Chinese scholars'English is not so good as English native speakers while writing an English research articles. As an opening part of English Research articles, introduction section contains three moves. The move of establishing a territory provides centrality claiming, topic generation, and the review of literature. The second move is establishing a niche. The authors may counter-claim, indicate a gap, raise a question, or continue a tradition in this move. Move 3 of occupying the niche may outline the purpose of the research, announce the present study, announce the main findings and indicate the structure of the paper. Whether the author can provide an excellent introduction or not has great impact on whether the paper can be published in a high-quality periodical. Linguists have done some research on it in the relevant aspects. However, so far not much contrastive studies on the discoursal level have been carried out from the aspects of functional grammar and discourse analysis. By using English-versioned introductions of Chinese and international English periodicals, this research studies the similarity and the difference of the introductions of the two samples on the discoursal level from three aspects: graphological features, moves and thematic structures, aiming to find out how the introductions are different in Chinese and international English periodicals. In the approach, English research articles from both Chinese and international English periodicals are collected (around 610,000 words in total). The writer selects 60 introductions (around 67,826 words in total) from several Chinese and international journals respectively. As a whole, this thesis is a combination of a quantitative study with a qualitative study. Article length, introduction length, move model, move length, theme distribution, and thematic progression are the parameters to be under statistics. Generally, in each introduction, the total number of a certain parameter is counted, with its proportion and average being calculated. In order to further dig into the similarity and the difference between these two samples, the independent T-test is used to verify whether the statistical difference is significant enough to distinguish Chinese data and international data from each other. Through the three-dimensioned discussion, we conclude that differences exist in the article length, introduction length, length of move 1 and move 3, frequency of unmarked theme, marked theme and conjunctive theme and thematic progression. Possible reasons are provided here to explain the similarity and the difference existing in these aspects. This thesis provides a comprehensive description of the discoursal difference of the introductions in Chinese and international English periodicals. The research findings are good reference for Chinese authors to write research articles in English better to obey the underlying writing rules in order to publish their articles in international authoritative periodicals, for Chinese editors of Chinese English periodicals to examine the articles they receive more closely and carefully to improve the Chinese English periodicals.