Contrastive Study On RA Introductions In Applied Linguistics By L1 And L2 Writers: Rhetorical Moves And Linguistic Realization

Recently, research article(RA) has become one of the most prominent research subjects in linguistic field. In the last two decades, studies on RA mainly adopted Swalesian genre analysis(1990) to explore its move structure, or applied corpus-based method to investigating its micro linguistic features. However, few studies of move analysis used corpus-based method to analyze lexical-grammatical realization. In particular, previous studies mainly focused on RAs written by English native scholars(L1) and second language learners(L2), whereas few of them had investigated second language scholars’ English RA writing.In this research, 200 English research articles(RAs) in applied linguistics were collected. L1 and L2 corpora were built by extracting introductions from collected RAs. RAs in L1 corpus were selected from international prestigious journals and RAs in L2 corpus were chosen from English journal in China. The Swalesian(1990, 2004) move schema was adopted to investigate organizational structure of introductions in the current corpus. Three moves was demarcated by two coders. Then, L1 and L2 introduction corpora were respectively further divided into three move sub-corpora based on demarcation of three moves. Finally, corpus-based software was employed to extract the linguistic features of three moves so as to compare the linguistic realization in L1 and L2 introductions. The results indicate that, first, the L1 introductions displayed a greater degree of conformity to Swalesian move schema, with 90% containing all three moves. The L2 introductions were deviated from the schema, with 71% containing all three moves. Second, the prominent difference between L1 and L2 introductions was move absence. To be specific, only 10% of L1 introductions had move absence, while 29% were found in L2 corpus with 19% lacking Move 2. Third, L1 writers used more rhetorical moves than L2 writers. In particular, L1 writers used Move 2 and Move 3 more often. Fourth, the length of Move 1 was almost the same in L1 and L2 corpora. However, the lengths of Move 2 and Move 3 in L1 corpus were twice longer than those in L2 corpus. Fifth, with regard to linguistic realization of Move 1, L1 introductions differed from L2 mainly in words of Step 2 and 3. The L1 writers used more specific descriptive words that were embodied in complicated sentences, while the L2 writers used more general words within simple sentences. In Move 2, L1 writers were more euphemistic and indirect by not only affirming the contributions of previous studies but also pointing out the gap, which was more skillful. In contrast, L2 writers overused negative lexical to point out limitations or weaknesses of prior studies directly and absolutely. In Move 3, more words was used by L1 writers to explicitly provide detailed description of their research, while less was used by L2 writers.The findings of this study may enhance Chinese scholars’ understanding of move structure of English RA and may have some pedagogical implications for English academic writing in China.