Final -- introduction

Introductions play an important role in academic articles because it will give the audience a clear clue about the topic and structure of the paper. Therefore, the question "What structure should an introduction follow" has drawn much attention by linguists. Corpus had been investigated in a variety of disciplines and some models were proposed. For example, Swales put forward CARS (Create A Research Space) model and revised it in 2004, breaking down introductions into three moves: establishing the area of research, establishing the gap in knowledge, and filling this gap. This model was frequently examined and researchers found out that most introductions in all kinds of discipline follow it well.

After CARS model had been revised and accepted as useful, it was widely applied to analysis in introductions of research articles. Especially in recent years, several papers were proposed each year discussing about the rhetorical element, crosslinguistic expression or other aspects of introductions. However, during such a long time only a few researchers paid close attention to the structural difference between introductions and other elements of research articles when applying CARS model (Riley, 1991; Samraj, 2005; Pho, 2008), while these other elements such as abstracts and conclusions are structurally similar to introductions. For example, abstracts also require a brief generalization of the context of the article, mentioning the research process and result which is similar to the Move 3 of introductions regarding CARS model. Therefore, question arises that "Do other parts of research article follow CARS model as introductions and why are they structurally different in a certain discipline?" The goal of this research is to find what is the structural difference between introductions and abstracts, and what factor causes such difference. The result will help authors to better understand how to write introduction.