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xample, if readers regard scholars’ experiences in doing research as important, theycan search for this information without much hesitation about whether there are suchdescriptions about experiences in PEAM since we have told them that introducingexperiences in PEAM is a common strategy in most cases; otherwise, they may haveto read line by line to find if there are introductions to what they think important,which costs time and patience.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review and Theoretical Foundation

2.1 Preface as a Sub-Genre of Academic Discourse
Preface as a noun in the Oxford Dictionary is defined as “an introduction to abook, especially one that explains the author’s aims” (Oxford Advanced Learner’sEnglish-Chinese Dictionary, 2009: 1557) which is very similar to the definitions ofentries foreword (Ibid:798) and prologue (Ibid:1586) though prologue also has to dowith films and plays. In the Longman Dictionary, a preface is “an introduction to abook or speech” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1998: 1177),located at the beginning pages before the main content, sometimes more formal than aforeword while a prologue shares similarities but could also appear in a play, longpoem, etc. According to the Chinese Xinhua Dictionary (2001: 1112), preface calledXu Yan in Chinese, means “an article before the main content of a book, usuallywritten by the author to introduce the procedure of writing the book or by others tointroduce and evaluate the book content.”Having integrated all these definitions above in dictionaries, we can abstractseveral characteristics of prefaces: first, a preface often exists as a beginningintroductory part before the main content of a book or sometimes other forms ofworks; second, as to a book, the term preface resembles foreword and prologue to agreat extent; third, a preface can be written not only by the author but also by otherpeople. These features blur the concept of preface. In fact, when searching for Englishmaterials for this research, we found out that a lot of books have more than one kindof preface including the prefaces written by authors, editors, prestigious orauthoritative people as recommenders or translators if necessary. And the forewordsare more likely to be written by famous professional academics except for the authorwhile the terms preface and prologue are usually interchangeable in books thoughprologue is used with lower frequency. Therefore, in order to be clear, we need tofurther clarify the differences among these generic titles as well as the function ofprefaces. And since the English materials selected for this research are authors’prefaces of English academic monographs，a typical academic discourse, we willdiscuss these issues under the academic setting.
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2.2 Previous Research on Prefaces
Scholars at home and abroad have investigated prefaces from variousperspectives. We are going to present some representative studies in the following andcomment on them in Section 2.2.3.Generally speaking, research on prefaces overseas covers studies fromperspectives such as these: genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, functionalanalysis and contrastive analysis.Studies on prefaces of genre analysis mostly focus on the generic structures ofprefaces since the genre analysis model raised up by Swales (1985, 1990) and Bhatia(1993). Bhatia (1993, 2004) proposes the genre-mixing phenomenon of prefaces inthe acad