| Researchers have to demonstrate the worthiness of their research explicitly,and such demonstration,usually taking place in the introduction section,is known as academic promotion.Although a great number of researchers have conducted extensive research on this topic,few studies have looked into the difference in the practice of promotion by published writers and L2 novice writers from China.In order to bridge this gap,this study investigated 120 papers in the field of applied linguistics(AL),60 MA theses by AL graduate students in Chinese mainland and 60 articles published in international AL journals.The types of promotion were manually identified and tagged.An analysis of these promotional types and their linguistic realizations revealed the following results:In the use of promotion,first,although novice writers wrote longer than expert writers,they had fewer instances of promotion than expert writers.Second,novice writers relied on appeal to salience of the theme as the primary promotion method,whereas expert writers used appeal to magnitude(such as the number of previous studies or the wide impact of a related phenomenon)significantly more than their novice counterparts.Third,expert writers showed a balance in the use of different types of promotion,while novice writers did not show such a balance.The use of promotion in different moves in the introduction section also differs between the two groups.In Move 1,novice writers tended to emphasize the significance of the research topic(RT),whereas the primary promotion type for expert writers was an emphasis on the prevalence of the phenomenon(PP).In Move 2,even though both groups employed problematicity most frequently and showed little between-group differences,expert writers demonstrated greater ease with pointing out controversies in previous studies(CPS)and inaccuracies of previous findings(IPF),whereas novice writers tended to emphasize the challenges involved in the research topic(CRT).In Move 3,both groups used appeal to salience as the primary promotion.With regard to the linguistic realization of promotion,though the two groups did not show remarkable differences in the percentage of words vs phrases,they did have differences in the employment of these linguistic tools.First,although both groups relied on adjectives as the primary linguistic device in promotion,novice writers relied them more heavily than expert writers.Second,expert writers used promotional verbs more frequently than novice writers.Third,both groups showed a preference for noun phrases as the most common type of the three phrase structures used in appeal-making,but expert writers use verb phrases more frequently than their novice counterparts.The two groups of writers also exhibited some differences in the linguistic realization of promotion in the moves of the introduction.In Move 1,even though both groups used adjectives more frequently than they did in other moves,novice writers used them to a greater extent with a higher percentage of adjectives.Move 2 showed little differences between the two groups.In Move 3,expert writers showed verbs significantly more frequently than novice writers as the primary promotional linguistic tool.These findings have theoretical and pedagogical implications.Theoretically,they enrich the empirical research on the use of promotion in internationally published articles and China's English learners' articles.The sub-classification of four promotional types identified previously and the validity of the findings obtained indicate the feasibility of such classification.Pedagogically,the differences in the practice of appeal-making by expert and novice writers suggest that the latter still have room for improvement.Based on research findings,it is advisable that academic writing instructors provide training and guidance for students in this aspect so as to help them not only learn to write academic papers but also be equipped with appropriate ways to promote their own research and academic achievements... |
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