| With the rapid progress of science and technology in the world, a great number of research articles published nationally and internationally to make new knowledge claims and report research results within the academic community. However, we should pay attention to the fact that Chinese researchers published a large number of articles in the national journals, but rarely published papers in international journals. Genre and genre analysis have become hot-debated issues in the fields of linguistic studies and the recent years have witnessed the growing interest in genre analysis of different types of texts. Research article as a genre, in particular, has been paid great attention by the researchers. However, the previous studies often focus on the sections such as Abstract, Introduction, and Discuss sections, little attention has been paid to the important component of research articles—literature reviews, let alone the contrastive study between English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews. Literature reviews in research articles have special communicative purposes and objects, and exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style as well as function.In this thesis, a total of 60 empirical articles (30 in English and 30 in Chinese) taken from six authoritative English and Chinese applied linguistic journals was adopted as the research samples. Mainly based on Swales's genre study and Connor's contrastive rhetoric study, the research made a contrastive analysis of English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews from distribution feature, the use of reporting verbs and citations to reveal the similarities and especially the differences of literature reviews across cultures. Statistics about the distribution proportion of literature reviews in whole articles and other sections of these articles in the two corpora were made respectively, and the distribution features of English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews were summarized accordingly. The use of reporting verbs and citation features between English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews were also analyzed and compared.The results of the present study have shown that there are similarities and differences between English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews.(1) In terms of distribution features, literature reviews have the widest distribution in Introduction section and the least distribution in Method section. The distribution of literature reviews in both the whole articles and each section of articles displays the same feature: literature reviews in English articles have much wider distribution than those in Chinese articles. This indicates that English writers pay more attention to the writing of literature reviews. (2) In the aspect of three types of reporting verbs (i.e. research verbs, textual verbs and mental verbs), both English writers and Chinese writers are less likely to use mental verbs, but there is a significant difference in the use of reporting verbs between English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews. Generally speaking, English writers use much more reporting verbs than Chinese writers. Specifically speaking, research verbs and textual verbs are also more frequently used in English literature reviews. This difference may result from cultural factors and rhetorical conventions.(3) As for citation features, both English writers and Chinese writers are more likely to use non-integral citations. However, the frequencies of citations show a significant difference between English literature reviews and Chinese literature reviews. English writers use more citations, but instead, Chinese writers often ignore or omit the citations. It just confirms the conclusion about distribution features in literature reviews.The differences of literature reviews between English and Chinese articles reflect different writing conventions of English and Chinese writers to some extent. The textual organization may be influenced by some cultural factors and rhetorical conventions. This study provided significant theoretical and practical implications for the teaching of academic writing. And it also provided better insights into different conventions of different languages and enhanced our disciplinary and cultural awareness so as to advance the academic communication.
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