A cross-disciplinary genre analysis of rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranians

The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in developing genre-oriented EAP material, and EAP teachers in postgraduate courses aiming at developing academic writing skills.