Investigating Thematicity in Applied Linguistics Textbooks: A Comparative Study of Foreword, Introduction and Preface

While identifying the generic structure of academic introductions has been the focus of extensive research over the last few decades, investigating the available linguistic resources that realize the identified generic structures seems to have been largely under-focused. In order to shed light on the way that the communicative purposes performed by academic introductions depict themselves in the linguistic choices exploited by language producers, the present study aimed to investigate the thematic organization and thematic progression that characterize three main variations within the introductory sections of academic textbooks. To this aim, the front matter pages of 60 applied linguistics textbooks (20 forewords, 20 introductions, 20 prefaces) were analyzed using Halliday’s (1994) thematic organization and McCabe’s (1999) revised model of thematic progression. The results indicated that the three sub-corpora were significantly different in terms of theme types and thematic progression patterns. These differences could be attributed to the nature and the different purposes fulfilled by the genre under investigation. It was concluded that in order to achieve their intended purposes, academic introduction writers need to consider the role played by different theme types and thematic progression patterns as one of the available linguistic resources that help realize different communicative purposes.