Rhetorical Analysis of Introduction Sections from Humanities and Sciences Research Theses Authored by Pakistani Scholars

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the rhetorical structures of the introduction sections of Pakistani research theses at postgraduate level. The corpus of study contains 32 “Introduction” sections of Pakistani research theses from two faculties: Humanities and Sciences. The faculty of Sciences include theses from disciplines of Zoology, Chemistry, Botany and Biochemistry, whereas the faculty of Humanities include theses of Mass Communication, English, Gender Studies and Computer Studies. Both qualitative and quantitative methods including textual analysis and frequency percentages have been used for data analysis. The online software Compleat Lexical Tutor(Cobb.2015) was employed to extract the sentence units of the data. A hand tagged move analysis was conducted by following Swales’ Model (2004) as a reference framework. All the instances of moves and steps were calculated to explore the rhetorical variation across two faculties. Findings of the study disclosed that Pakistani authors follow their own pattern of Move 1 (Establishing the research territory) along with the variation in frequency of its constituent steps across two faculties. The demarcation between two faculties has revealed that, in the field of sciences, there is a stronger use of topic generalization than in humanities. Moreover, the inter-textual links to prior research in the field of sciences are provided more frequently than in the field of humanities. However, scholars from the faculty of Humanities represent their stance by claiming relevance of the field.