A Comparative Study of Rhetorical Moves in Introduction Sections of International Journal Articles

Like abstracts as part of research articles, introduction section rhetorical moves are important for the writers, especially the novice ones to follow in research writing. Therefore, the rhetorical moves of this sub-genre need to be introduced to them. It is more important when the rhetorical moves are based on their discourse communities. This study tries to explore the rhetorical moves of introduction sections of international journal articles (IJRA). This study is a descriptive research using genre approach for the analysis. It takes the IJRAs of three discourse communities (DC): Education, Technology, and Biology. Each DC consists of 10 sub-genres of introduction sections so that the total number of DC sub genres is 30 IJRAs. All these sub-genres are analyzed using the Creating a Research Space (CARS) that is presented on tables. They are analyzed, discussed, and finally inferred for providing the generalization of the results. The results showed that not all the authors are complied with the rhetorical moves as the measurement used in this study. Among the three discourse communities: Education, Technology, and Biology, only Technology discourse community that is complied with the rhetorical moves of introduction section. This study recommends that the authors should follow the rhetorical moves of introduction section as used in this study rather than just writing this section at random. Further research can be done by including more discourse communities to get more generalizable results