A corpus-based analysis of the scientific RA genre and RA introduction

The Research Article (RA) is an important and challenging academic genre as it contains multiple parts such as introduction, methodology, results, analysis/discussion of findings, and conclusion. Each part contains one or more subgenres. Hence, although essential for teaching, learning and applications, genre-based analysis of the RA is generally considered to be very difficult in nature because of its complexity. Without sufficient genre and linguistic knowledge of the RA, English Foreign Language (EFL) students and researchers are not able to employ the correct structure or organization and appropriate linguistic/language expressions for clear communication of their ideas. The purpose of this study is threefold: to determine the linguistic features of the common moves in the “Introduction” section (i.e. a sub-genre of the RA) using corpus analysis, to compare with the linguistic features of the whole RA, and to compare the use of rhetorical moves in the “Introduction” with previous results on “Abstracts” of academic conference RAs. The rationale for focusing on the “Introduction” is that beginner EFL writers generally find it difficult for composition as it contains several stages which may be flexible in order, content and quantity. 543 RAs from the Journal of Optics (from 1997 to 2001, as the first part of a longitudinal study) were analyzed in this research. The main methods utilized were mining for data collection and corpus-based analysis of genre-based linguistic features (e.g. lexicon list, n-gram).