A Contrastive Study On Reporting Of Introductions Of Academic Papers In Chinese And International English Periodicals

Introduction is a crucial part of English academic papers. It contains three moves, that is, establishing a territory, establishing a niche and occupying the niche. Among them, the first move provides centrality stating, topic generation and the literature review. The literature review is mainly realized by reporting. Reporting application in the introduction can demonstrate what has been done in the specific field, understand what attitude writers hold to the previous researches or researchers and reveal the gap between the present and the previous researches. Whether writers have used reporting properly or not has great influence on the quality of English academic papers. However, it has been found that it is very difficult for Chinese learners of English to use reporting, they get confused about how to cite appropriately the previous researchers and how to choose reporting to imply their arguments, which as a consequence weakens the theoretical basis and credibility of their studies.Many scholars have done the researches on reporting. Dozens of years ago, however, they tend to focus on the grammar, semantic categories and pragmatic functions, and the corpus-based contrastive study has not been sufficiently conducted, especially on reporting in the introduction. Thus it is necessary to make a contrastive study on the reporting in the introductions of academic papers by CLE (hereafter abbreviated as CLE) and native speakers of English (hereafter abbreviated as NSE).Based on two self-created corpora,through the means of SPSS, the present study adopts the corpus-based contrastive approach to analysis, so as to find out the differences between the two corpora in terms of reporting and reporting verbs.The analysis shows that there are considerable similarities and conspicuous differences in the reporting and reporting verbs use between the two corpora.At first, the present study analyzes reporting from the following two aspects. (1) As for reporting structures, CLE and NSE both tend to use integral author-reporting verbs and non-integral author-non-reporting verbs. But these reporting structures occur in CLE's corpus in a much lower frequency. (2) In terms of reporting forms, CLE and NSE both prefer non-integral reporting form, focusing on the previous findings or suggestions. Differently, CLE use less frequently.Then, the present study analyzes reporting verbs from the following four aspects. (1) In terms of semantic categories of reporting verbs, CLE and NSE tend to use reporting verbs of Discourse Acts, Reporting verbs of Cognition Acts are rarely used by CLE and NSE, even if they use reporting verbs of Cognition Acts, they prefer positive and tentative verbs to cite other's researches. CLE do not use critical verbs. (2) From the aspect of frequency of reporting verbs, CLE employ fewer reporting verbs within limited range of vocabulary while NSE use much more reporting verbs within a wider rang of vocabulary. As for frequency of the same reporting verb, NSE use more high-frequency. (3) In terms of reporting verb tenses, CLE tend to use the simple present tense the most with other tenses missing. Whereas, NSE are skillful at the tense-alternation. (4) Talking about reporting verb voices, both CLE and NSE use more frequently the active voice than the passive voice. However, NSE possess higher frequency in the use of the two voices. Meanwhile , the active voice is used the most in integral author- reporting verbs and non-integral author-non-reporting verbs in the two corpora while the passive voice is used the most from the aspect of integral author-reporting verbs and non-integral author-non-reporting verbs in CLE's corpus, while NSE adopt non-integral author- reporting verbs and non-integral author-non-reporting verbs the most.Possible reasons to explain the above differences are provided. These differences could result from different thinking patterns, different awareness of writings, negative transfer from CLE's native culture and so on.The present study could provide new insights into reporting in the introduction for academic papers. It may also give some inspirations for relevant English teaching and learning.