RHETORICAL DIFFERENCES IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS PUBLISHED IN CHINA AND INTERNATIONALLY.

In this study, English agricultural science research articles (RA) Introductions published in China and internationally have been examined in order to discover, whether the presence of move/step in each context are similar or different. The two corpora, comprising of 45 English Introductions, published in China and 45 international Introductions in agricultural science were analyzed using Kanoksilapatham's (2005) model as the analytical tool, revealing that both sets of RAs were similar in their presence of move, namely 3 moves for each. However, due to a number of factors, discrepancies between the two corpora have given rise to the choices of steps. Perhaps, the presence of step within Move2 is the most striking difference between the two corpora. For example, the two groups of writers shared the step of indicating a research gap, but the Chinese researchers used the additional step of research problem and their international counterparts used the additional step of making a hypothesis. The finding of the present study can provide much insight into the rhetorical structure of RAs in this particular field and help those novice researchers, particularly Chinese novice researchers, who want to write for international publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]