الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Inspired by Swales’ seminal work on genre analysis (1990, 2004), introductions to research articles have been vigorously researched. A substantial body of these studies, however, employed a top-down analysis which has limitations. Besides, research relevant to the behaviour of Egyptian academics writing in English is limited. Accordingly, this study attempts to fill this void in the literature by investigating the similarities and differences in the macro and micro structure of introductions to research articles written by Egyptian academics and those written by native English-speaking (NES) writers in the well-established discipline of applied linguistics. A corpus of 30 introductions to research articles written by the two groups of writers was analysed in terms of Swales’ (2004) Create-a-Research-Space (CaRS) model. The results indicated that NES-authored introductions displayed closer affinity with the CaRS model than those authored by Egyptian academics. While the majority of NES-authored introductions (11, 73.3%) included all three moves, only 5 (33.3%) of the introductions authored by Egyptians were detected to have all three moves. Additionally, NES authors employed the archetypical move structure (Move1-Move2-Move3) more frequently than Egyptians did. A significant difference, yet, was the tendency of Egyptian academics to avoid challenging or criticizing previous investigators when attempting to demarcate a niche to their research. However, all three moves of Swales’ model were found frequent and conventional, albeit in varying percentages, in the two datasets. As for linguistic features, the two groups of scholarly writers displayed a great deal of similarities. They both established a territory (Move 1) with an extensive use of the present perfect, citations, amplifiers (e.g., ‘extensively’, ‘widely’, ‘increased’), evaluative adjectives (e.g., ‘significant’, ‘serious’, ‘considerable’), and time-frame expressions (e.g., ‘over the past two decades’, ‘over recent years’). When attempting to establish a niche (Move 2), both groups utilized the present perfect, adversative connectors (e.g., ‘however’, ‘although’, ‘unfortunately’), and lexical items that indicate scarcity of existing research (e.g., ‘rare’, ‘little’, ‘few’). Finally, they presented their present work (Move 3) with an extensive use of the simple present and deictic elements (e.g., ‘this study’, ‘this paper’, ‘this article’). An interesting difference, however, was the observed tendency of NES authors to present their research with the use of self-references (e.g., ‘I’, ‘my’), unlike Egyptian academics who employed personal pronouns only to display strong commitment to limitations of their research. The findings of this study highlight the need to instill the rhetorical organization and linguistic features of the different sections of the research article in graduate academic writing classes.