Cross-linguistic Study of Rhetorical Structure of Academic Book Reviews in Persian and English

The academic journal book review introduces new books to a particular discipline and assesses their value in relation to the development of the field. Following the genre analysis tradition by Swales (1990), several studies on book review rhetorical structure seem to support its generic status. However, it is still unclear to what extent factors like the language in which texts are written may affect the rhetorical structure of book review. To explore this factor, the present study analyzes 60 samples of academic book reviews, 30 in English, and 30 in Persian in the field of sociology. To investigate the generic structure of book reviews, Suarez and Moreno’s (2008) generic model, comprising four moves and various steps, was applied to the data. The results showed that both English and Persian writers applied the four moves proposed by Suarez and Moreno, although there were some variations in the application of steps. Familiarity with the rhetorical structure of book review genre would help readers to come to text with some expectations of the overall content and form of the texts which enables them to apply certain strategies more properly while reading the texts.