Contrastive Analysis Of Method Sections In English And Chinese Research Articles

Genre and genre analysis has become a hot-debated issue in the studies of linguistics fields and the past twenty years has witnessed the growing interest in genre analysis of different types of texts. Research article as a genre, in particular, has been paid great attention to by the researchers. However, the previous studies often focus on the sections such as Abstract, Introduction and Discussion, little attention has been paid to the important component of empirical articles - Method section, let alone the contrastive study between English and Chinese Method section. Although English and Chinese texts in the same genre should have similar features in textual construction, some social and cultural factors may constrain the particular textual constructions.This thesis aims at examining the degree of variability of English Method sections and Chinese Method sections which share the same genre (that is, the empirical articles in academic journals) and the same discipline (that is applied linguistics), and exploring the social and cultural factors which contribute to the variation between English and Chinese textual construction. The present study mainly makes a contrastive analysis of the move structure and the key features (graphological features and citation features) between English Method sections and Chinese Method sections. First of all, the author randomly selects 60 samples from 3 authorative international journals and 3 key domestic journals in the field of applied linguistics. These 60 samples consist of 30 English Method sections written by native speakers and 30 Chinese Method sections written by Chinese scholars. Then, the author adopts Swales' dual level Move-Step analysis approach and statistical analysis method to conduct the contrastive analysis of move structures and key features.The results of the present study have shown that there are similarities and differences between English and Chinese Method sections, which will be summarized as follows.(1) In terms of graphological features, Method sections in English samples are longer than those in Chinese ones (the average total words of English articles are about 1.5 times that of the average total characters of Chinese articles; so are the average length in words of the Method sections of these two samples). However, the percentages of Method sections to the whole research articles between the English and Chinese samples have no significant difference, which indicates that the writers of these two cultures attach same importance to Method sections when writing empirical articles of applied linguistics.(2) On the level of moves structures, there is no significant difference, while on the level of steps following some moves, some significant differences exist. In terms of Move 1, the difference lies in that the Chinese writers prefer to use Step 1 while the English writers favor Step 2. The second differences mainly appear in the choice of steps: Move 3-Step 2 and Move 4-Step 2. Statistical results have shown that these steps have a higher frequency in English samples than in Chinese samples. This indicates that English writers pay much more attention to reasoning than Chinese writers while writing Method sections.(3) As for citation features, the frequencies of citations show a significant difference between English and Chinese samples. English writers use more citations than Chinese writers and show the citation sources clearly, while Chinese writers often ignore or delete the citations in the Method sections. This indicates that the Chinese writers do not pay much attention to citations in their Method section writing.The differences of writing convention between English and Chinese Method sections in applied linguistics reflect the difference of writing practices between English and Chinese writers. The textual organization may be influenced by some social and cultural factors. The findings of this study not only can provide reference for English teachers who take a genre-based teaching approach to English academic writing, but also facilitate foreign language learners to develop awareness of textual construction typical of Method sections of research article, and thus improve the quality of their research articles.