Genre Analysis of ELT and Nursing Academic Written Discourse through Introduction

Since Swales’ (1981, 1990) CARS model work on the move structure of research articles, studies on genre analysis have been carried out amongst which works on different parts of research articles in various disciplines has gained a considerable literature. This study aims to investigate the rhetorical structure of the Introduction sections of articles in two fields of English Language Teaching (ELT) and Nursing, based on two corpora. Each corpus contains 25 research articles related specifically to the field under study. This study initially identified the structural organization of the Introduction sections of the articles. The results of this analysis revealed that both corpora contained the moves proposed in CARS model and almost no significant differences were observed in the move structures of articles in the afore-mentioned fields. Therefore, there is a considerable tendency for both ELT and Nursing to use CARS model. The findings from the analysis could provide linguistic researchers in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) with a holistic and unitary methodology as an authentic model of language in use through enriching their understandings and knowledge about the true nature and organization of different disciplines.