José Belém de Oliveira Neto
Intercultural rhetoric (IR) is the study of written discourse between individuals with different cultural backgrounds (Connor, 2011). One of the aims of IR is to help teachers to develop pedagogical strategies for raising students’ awareness on the rhetorical organization of genres across disciplines in different contexts. Numerous studies have investigated and compared rhetorical organization in different disciplines and languages. Research comparing American English and Brazilian Portuguese in medicine are scarce (Hirano, 2009; Rezende & Hemais, 2004). This study draws on the perspective of IR for analyzing the rhetorical organization of ten research articles (RAs) in American English and ten RAs in Brazilian Portuguese. In this comparative analysis, the genre-analysis model proposed by Nwogu (1997) for medical RAs is used to identify rhetoric patterns in both languages. The findings of this study provide a genre-based description of whole RAs both in American English and Brazilian Portuguese and suggest that analysis of moves, submoves and steps may have pedagogical implications which can be adopted by practitioners to help students build awareness in relation to differences in the writing strategies in the L1 and L2 RAs.
