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Research articles are a genre which researchers use in their respective academic or specialist disciplines and fields. They play important roles in creating and disseminating knowledge within discourse communities and the world at large.English has now become the international language of research and scholarship, and more and more non-native English researchers from various disciplines communicate their research findings in international journals in English.
The study dealt with in this thesis focuses on introduction parts of research articles as patterned forms of academic discourse most familiar to English speaking academics. Thirty research article introductions from three established journals in the field of applied linguistics -English for Specific Purpose (ESP), the Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) and System are chosen for detailed analysis. The corpus is restricted to empirical studies. Theoretical articles and review articles published in the journals are excluded from the scope of the present study.
In the light of Swales CARS (create a research space) model, this study investigates moves and steps employed in the corpus. As a result, this thesis finds that researchers tend to employ step 2 (making topic generalization) or step 3 (reviewing previous research) in M 1 to establish the territory, then establish the niche by step 2 (indicating the gap) in M 2 and end by step 2 (announcing their research) in M 3.
Hallidays concept of projection provides a framework for the data analysis.Projection is the logico-semantic relationship between two or more clauses. They are used by writers to make explicit the fact that the information they are conveying represents their personal point of view. Three types of information are expressed in how the writer frames his projection syntactically and semantically, and in how he uses them to construct a discourse. Types of projections are then classified in terms of their structure and content. Besides, projection verbs and that-construction are explored in detail for their evaluative functions. An underlying assumption guiding the analysis is that writers aim to accomplish multiple perspectives as they use projection to organize research article introductions (RAIs) and they make lexical and grammatical choices in constructing projection.Evaluation analysis of projections is chosen as another focus in the current study.The thesis looks at evaluation of projections from two perspectives. One is the evaluation of projection verbs； the other is from the perspective of dialogism. It is found that there are far more values for dialogic expansion in the present data, that is,academic writers tend to open up alternative viewpoints form the potential readers.They offer their views in a less assured way, presenting more negotiable interpretations. By using this strategy, the authors can discuss the topic further in their respective discourse communities.The study bases its analysis on data of written texts, and relies primarily on observation of the linguistic phenomenon of projections. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are both employed in the current study. Implications for EAP writing pedagogy are also examined in the latter part of this thesis.