كليدواژه :
Academic Writing , research articles , introduction , literature review , CARS model
چكيده فارسي :
Academic writing in general and writing research articles in particular are among the most indispensable skills members of an academic discourse community have to acquire in order to be acknowledged as professional members of the community. Following Swales’ (1981, 1990) pioneering work on the move structure of research article Introductions, the Create-a-Research-Space (CARS) model, despite the huge number of genre studies carried out on different parts of the research article, research on the Literature Review sections in the studies organized in the Introduction-Literature Review-Method-Results-Discussion format remains extremely limited, and even lesser has been done to examine whether the Literature Reviews and Introductions as separate sections belong to the same genre. This study aimed at comparatively investigating research article Introductions and Literature Reviews in the field of applied linguistics, adopting Swales’ (2004) CARS model as the point of departure, to reveal how these two sections, when stranded, are different or alike in terms of the utilized rhetorical moves and (sub-)steps. The corpus comprised the introduction and literature review sections of 30 research articles, drawn from the most recent issues of 5 ISI journals. The findings of the analysis revealed that the two sections, besides bearing major similarities, carry out slightly different missions: The Introduction section paints a general picture of the work while simultaneously sets clear goals and thus plays “a more macro function” role, which creates the initially required research space for the researcher (Kwan, 2006, p. 52). The literature review section, on the other hand, is more closely woven into the core of the research, more flexible in terms of the generic structure and thus less consistent with the strict CARS model. Despite these differences, the strong resemblance between the two sections implies that they belong to the same genre colony (Bhatia, 2001, 2004) of academic research introductions. The CARS model was modified in light of the findings of the study.
