Genre Analysis and Genre-mixing Across Various Realizations of Academic Book Introductions in Applied Linguistics

Motivated by the need to explore the introductory sections of textbooks, the present study attempted to scrutinize three realizations of academic introductions, namely, Preface, Introduction, and Foreword in terms of their functions and potential generic structures in light of Swales’s (1990) views of genre. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate genre-mixing as an interdiscursivity element across the above-mentioned texts (Bhatia, 1993). In so doing, a heuristic analysis was adopted to achieve a less biased view of the nature of the variations of introduction and to proceed systematically in developing a potential generic model. Seventy five text samples were extracted to identify the variations in exploiting the moves across the datasets under study. The findings of the study revealed almost similar schematic frameworks for the three manifestations of introductions. Moreover, examining meta-discursive and rhetorical devices across the datasets indicated the ways in which book introduction writers successfully appropriate genre resources and mix a promotional with an informative purpose.