4.2.3 Genre Analysis of Introductions and Literatu...
While there is a large amount of research investigating the schematic structure of Introductions from the researchers’perspective,a limited amount examines the writers’view on the communicative functions that they intend to fulfil in the opening section.Swales(1981)conducted a text analysis of 48 research article Introductions collected from hard sciences,social sciences and the biology/medical field and from this developed a four-move model describing the rhetorical organisation of research article Introductions.Further work led to two revised CARS models in 1990 and 2004.A number of studies based on the revised models examined the moves used in RA Introductions in a range of disciplines(e.g.Tessuto,2015;Martín &León Pérez,2014;Kanoksilapatham,2012;Samraj,2002)and in different languages(e.g.Sheldon,2011;Loi &Evans,2010;Hirano,2009).Despite the differences in the intended audience,length and communicative purposes between RAs and Theses,the move models of Thesis Introductions and Literature Reviews(Bunton,2002;Kwan,2006)are also heavily influenced by Swales’RA model(1990),and all of these models were developed relying on the researchers’understanding of the communicative functions.
This research re-examines the schematic structure of Thesis Introductions and Literature Reviews by exploiting the thesis writers’view on the rhetorical structure of their writing.It comprises two parts:first,an analysis of metatexts was conducted to investigate thesis writers’views(the emic view)on the communicative functions of the Introduction and Literature Review chapters and the content used to realise those functions.The second part is a move analysis of the Introduction and Literature Review chapters using the functions and content identified in the metatext analysis as moves and steps.