A contrastive study of the introduction section of English and Persian medical research articles

Genre Analysis has received considerable attention in recent years in ESP context. Genre has been taken as a property of text, which allows it to be described as a sequence of elements, or "moves". And each move serves as a part of the total communicative purpose of that genre. In this study, the introduction section of 200 medical research articles, 100 American- English and 100 Persian were analyzed according to Swalesʹ (1990) model. Move analysis was performed to find the frequency of moves and steps in the introduction sections of English and Persian medical research articles. The results revealed that both in English and Persian, Introduction section of research articles are similar regarding their move frequency, but the realization of these three moves are radically different in these two languages. To solve the problem of academic isolation, syllabus designers must include genre awareness courses to sensitize the students to the features that make an academic text acceptable to the members of the discourse community. Findings of the study could be applied to alleviate the long-standing problem of bad writing amongst this discipline practitioners.