La seccion discusion de los articulos de investigacion cientifica de psicologia en ingles y en español : un esquema retorico ejemplar contrastivo

Abstract

The way in which information is organised in the individual sections of research articles has been the focus of numerous studies; especially, since the appearance of Swales` (1990) CARS model of analysis. Although severa( researchers have proposed different rhetorical structures for each of the canonical sections of the research article in different disciplines, no study has specifically dealt with the structural organisation of Discussions in Psychology from a contrastive perspective. The present study, thus, examines the rhetorical organisation of Discussions Sections of English and Spanish research articles in this discipline and proposes a template for this section in these two languages. This study made use of two independent but comparable corpora; ten Discussions in English and ten Discussions in Spanish from well-known journals were first selected following conventional sampling procedures. Then, a move analysis was conducted applying the method proposed by Dudley-Evans (1994) and Holmes (1997). In general, the results reveal that there are similarities and differences between English and Spanish Discussions in terrns of the use of moves. Based on these findings, a single-level template consisting of eight texts segments is suggested for the articles in the corpora. The rhetorical structure herein proposed captures the basic organisation of Discussions in English and in Spanish Psychology research articles. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for ESP students, novice researchers and ESP teachers.