Bridging Macro-Rhetorical Moves and Micro-Cohesive Devices in Academic Discourse: A Critical Review of English-Vietnamese Contrastive Rhetoric

Abstract

Abstract. Driven by institutional pressures on second-language scholars to publish in internationally indexed journals, this systematic review evaluates two decades (2006–2026) of empirical literature on research article introductions in the English-Vietnamese context to address the persistent divide between macro-structural and micro-linguistic analytical traditions. Guided by an adapted PRISMA 2020 protocol, 45 empirical studies retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar were systematically selected and synthesized through qualitative thematic coding and descriptive content analysis. The synthesis demonstrates that existing literature has largely evolved along two parallel trajectories comprising macro-level move analyses (22 studies) and micro-level cohesion investigations (17 studies) with only six studies examining their interaction. While genre based research shows that Vietnamese authors frequently favor indirect niche establishment strategies in Move 2, cohesion focused studies report distinct tendencies in conjunction deployment and thematic progression, thereby uncovering three major gaps including the methodological separation between structural and textual analysis, the lack of move specific functional accounts of cohesive ties, and the limited integration of linguistic typology with discourse practices. To bridge these gaps, this review proposes an integrated conceptual framework that treats communicative functions as the functional context for lexicogrammatical choices, offering a unified model for future contrastive research and establishing pedagogical directions for academic writing instruction.