A contrastive rhetoric study of Arabic and English research article introductions

There were three main purposes of this study. First, the study was to find whether writers with diverse educational backgrounds would perform the same written task differently. Second, it was designed to identify the macrostructure/rhetorical organization of research article (RA) introductions written in Arabic by Arab scholars. The third purpose was to explore differences and similarities between Arabic RA introductions and English RA introductions produced by Americans who were native speakers of English. The corpus used in this study consisted of 15 research article introductions divided into three groups: Arab-educated Arabs (A-Ed-A, authors who earned their graduate degrees in the Arab World), US-educated Arabs (US-Ed-A, authors who earned their degrees in the United States, and US-Native English speaking group (US-N). Swales's (1990) CARS model was used as a tool of analysis. Comparisons were made among the three groups at two levels of analysis: the macrostructure level and the move-step level. The two Arabic groups were found different at the two levels of analysis: the macrostructure level and the move-step level. This result signified that there were two models of rhetorical organization of Arabic RA introductions: a homegrown model and a hybrid model. The homegrown exhibited features which were more distant from the US-N group than the US-Ed-A group which shared some US writing norms. In addition, both of the Arabic groups were different from their American counterpart. Arab authors claimed the importance of their research in the real world rather than in existing research tradition as was the case in the American group. Thus, educational background of Arab RA writers could account for the preference of the rhetorical organization model of RA introductions as the US-Ed-A writers employed a hybrid rhetorical organization and the A-Ed-A writers employed the homegrown model. In spite of the differences in the Arabic context, the norms of Arabic writing tolerate/embrace such diversity.

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