Literature Review of Introductions

Recently, there has been growing interest in examining of academic article introductions. Research area of linguistic is broad and expanding in last decade, especially with the focus on structure of academic articles. A central issue of the research is a linguistic examination of academic articles with focus on introductions. The CARS Model is a central theoretical framework of linguistic research focusing on introductions, because provides a comprehensive steps to examine single steps of introduction with a logic order. However the CARS Model may be problematic to apply in non-English countries or in non-humanities sciences. This article investigate a structure of academic introductions in a different languages and different areas to determine where the CARS model is relevant and where is not.

The main theoretical framework used in researches had been a CARS Model. Few researches had been done during the nineties, but majority of researches were conducted after 2004, when the CARS Model had been revised. The previous researches have a similar structure. Mostly quantitative methods were used with the focus on corpus of academic articles ranging from six articles (Liao, 2009) to two hundreds articles (Mahzari & Maftoon, 2007). The domains of investigated articles differs from social sciences to natural and computer sciences, so the extent of research is extensive. As well as representation of different languages is broad and range from English to Chinese and Hungarian.

The most of the articles uses the CARS Model as a central framework of research and there is almost no comparison with another framework. CARS Model is thus in a position as the only correct model for examining the structure of academic articles. Also the corpus of examined articles is quite narrow and the result of research may be misrepresenting. There is also a narrow range of examinated languages. Languages as a Spanish, Chinese, Russian, French and Hindi are used by the majority of the world but in the research are represented minimally. There are still a gaps and place for further research.