A Comparative Genre Analysis of Academic Textbook Introductions in Applied Linguistics and Medicine

Motivated by the need to explore the adjacency of introductory sections of textbooks, the present study attempted to scrutinize prefaces, introductions, and forewords, as three realizations of academic textbook introductions, in terms of their functions and potential generic structures. The study aimed to investigate the possible variations across medicine and applied linguistics, representing hard applied and soft applied sciences respectively. In order to proceed systematically in developing a potential generic model, a heuristic analysis was employed to achieve a less biased view of the nature of these variations of introductions. To this aim, 600 text samples were selected from the two disciplines. The findings showed that, overall, although the informative moves were more frequent than the promotional moves in the schematic frameworks for the different manifestations of introductions in medicine compared with applied linguistics, the genres in the two disciplines were more similar than different. The study revealed the ways in which the writers appropriated the generic resources and successfully mixed promotional, informative, and evaluative purposes of these adjacent genres. Keywords: Applied Linguistics, Genre analysis, Medicine, Textbook introductions;