Translated Abstract
With English becoming the “international scientific language”, more efforts have been put to help NNS scientists to write English research articles (RAs). Among these efforts, ESP genre analysis is considered as an effective way to help NNS speakers’ EAP writing (Hyland, 2003). Researchers also combine ESP genre analysis with contrastive study in order to analyze the different features between English RAs and RAs written in other languages, so that they can offer valuable pedagogical suggestions. Aiming to help Chinese scientists in their English RA writing, this thesis conduct a contrastive study between English and Chinese RAs in the field of Electronics and Information, a field greatly neglected in previous genre analysis. The comparison is not only at the level of generic structure, but also at the level of lexical and grammar. In this research, 40 RAs were obtained by using stratified random sampling strategy. 20 English RAs were selected from 4 prestigious English journals and 20 from 4 Chinese journals. Each section of RA is analyzed according to their sequence in the article. Comparison is not only made between generic structure of RAs in EI (Electronics and Information) and RAs in other disciplines, but also made between English RAs and Chinese RAs. The English Abstract written by Chinese scientists (CEA) in Chinese journals is also compared to Chinese Abstract (CA) and English Abstract (EA) in English journals such comparison could not only describe the current English level of Chinese scientists, but also help to identify difficulties that Chinese scientists might have in their English RA writing. The research found that compared to IMRD structure, the overall generic structure of RAs in EI tend to have two different ways of reporting research method, a short Results section, and a separate Conclusion section. The analysis of these sections suggested that such RA composition is greatly influenced by the disciplinary characteristics. The comparison between English and Chinese RAs suggested that these two groups of RAs basically follow the same generic structure, but have different preference in employment of “Move” and “Step”. Writers of English RAs tend to emphasize the precision and accuracy of the research in their article, while writers of Chinese RAs are more likely to stress the value and application of their findings. Such different preference might stem from different scientific tradition. The metadiscoursal analysis of EA and CA also indicated that writers of EA tend to be more reader-friendly and more cautious in their writing, when they are compared to those writers of CA and CEA. All these differences between English RAs and Chinese RAs were due to various factors: language, culture, the size of discourse community, scientific tradition and so on, which waved together and influenced each other making the situation more complex. In the analysis of English Abstracts written by Chinese scientists, the “frontal overloaded” Theme was found to occur frequently, which suggested that the native language greatly influenced Chinese scientists’ English EAP writing. The metadiscoursal analysis among EA, CA and CEA suggested that Chinese scientists needed to improve their manipulation of metadiscourse devices in their English writing. Not only providing generic structure of RAs in EI, but also analyzing difficulties Chinese scientists have in their English Abstract writing, this research could be of great value to teaching activities trying to help Chinese scientists in their English EAP writing. The structure of this thesis is like the following: Chapter I introduced the main motivation and purpose of this research Chapter II reviewed and evaluated previous researches in genre analysis. Chapter III briefly introduced the field of Electronics and Information, as well as the standard of data selection, and then presented the research framework employed in this research. Chapter IV discussed the generic structure of Abstracts and Chapter V discussed the macro-structure and micro-structure of RAs in each section. Chapter VI analyzed the metadiscourse structure of Abstracts. Comparison between English and Chinese RAs were also made in Chapter IV, Chapter V and Chapter VI. Chapter VII mainly discussed various factors that could influence the composition of RAs and the different preference of “move” and “step” in RAs written in different languages.
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