| Important research often appears first (and often only) in academic journals. Whenever we do research, we should consult the papers in journals relevant to your topic. In order to take an active part in international exchanges and to present the progress of new knowledge of certain fields in China, the academic quality of published papers of the journals is the top issue of concern. The statistics shows that there are more than 186 China's English scientific journals (hereafter abbreviated as CESJ) in China. Among them, only 36 journals are listed by SCI and EI, which means that China's e scientific journals can not keep up with the international English scientific journals (hereafter abbreviated as IESJ).To prevent a paper from being rejected and ensure that it addresses the right audience, it must have a proper title that satisfies certain requirements. Writing the titles to research articles is therefore a challenging exercise that demands the use of various skills. Still, although the research papers is one of the most thoroughly studied research genres, the study of research article titles does not share the same privilege, nor does the contrastive study between China's and international English scientific journal papers.This study is designed to reveal the similarities and differences of English titles of scientific research articles written by NES (native English speakers) and CEL (Chinese English learners) from three aspects: the graphological level, the syntactical level and the lexical level.We restricted our study to journal papers that were published during 2003-2006 and that could be considered original contributions. The final two corpora comprised of 4,000 journal paper titles, around 42,582 words in total, in which the CESJ contains 2,000 journal paper titles, around 21,190 words in total; while the IESJ includes journal paper titles, around 21,403 words in total. As a whole, this thesis is a quantitative study. Some parameters such as title length, structural constructions, head nouns in nominal group constructions and prepositions in prepositional group constructions are counted, with its proportion and average being calculated. In order to give a statistical verification for whether there exists significant difference between the two corpora, Independent-sample t test is processed.Through the three-dimensioned discussion, the present study concluded that on the graphological level, there exists no significant difference between CESJ and IESJ in terms of title length, but capitalization of titles varies greatly from journal to journal. Significant differences lie in the occurrence among nominal group construction, full sentence construction, compound sentence construction and prepositional sentence construction. After an in-depth investigation of nominal group, significant differences lie in the"N"construction, the"N + post-modifiers"construction and the"pre-modifiers + N + post-modifiers"construction. Homogeneity and heterogeneity both reflected in this study in the aspect of words choice in titles between the two groups. Possible reasons are provided here to explain the similarities and differences existing in these sides.The study may be helpful for those concerned: scientific researchers, practitioners and students, and English for academic writing teachers. It also attempts to increase our understanding of the current practices of authors and editors in the use of titles. The lines of evidence registered in this study support suggestions as to how to guide Chinese English learners to write titles appropriately. |
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