Comparative Generic Analysis of Introductions of English and Persian Dentistry Research Articles

The present contrastive study reports a research on a genre analysis of the introduction section of dentistry research articles between English and Persian languages. To this end, 70 introduction sections written in English and Persian and published in wellknown leading journals were examined and analyzed using Swales’ (2004) classification of moves and steps in introduction sections. Frequency and Chi-square test were used to examine the differences between the two corpora of introduction sections. The analysis of the introduction sections shows that Move 1 step 1 “claiming centrality”, Move 2 step 1a “counter-claiming” and Move 3.1 “Announcing present research descriptively and/or purposively” are the most frequently used moves in English and Persian corpora. Moreover, the findings show that the majority of research articles across the two corpora opened with Move 1.1 “Claiming centrality”. Also, results revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in certain moves between English and Persian introduction sections.