The aim of this multi-dimensional corpus-based study is to contrastively analyze thegenre-specific features of introductions in a corpus of PhD theses in Applied Linguisticswritten at Turkish universities and the research articles published in reputableinternational academic journals in the same field. The move structure analysisconducted using the Create-a-Research-Space (CARS) Model (Swales 232) and theanalysis of the lexico-grammatical features associated with the identified movesrevealed extensive variations across the two sub-corpora. The hand-tagged movestructure analysis was complemented with the electronic analysis of the data using acorpus software. One important finding was that the thesis authors tended to avoidMove 2, “establishing a niche” and inserted moves such as “stating assumptions” intotheir introductions, which were not aligned with the conventions of research articles.Research article authors, on the other hand, used Move 2 effectively through a widerange of linguistic strategies to highlight the significance of their study and to promotetheir work. Based on the findings, the paper offers awareness-raising strategies andpedagogical recommendations for novice writers who would like to recontextualizetheir theses as research articles and for graduate programs and thesis supervisors inassisting graduate students in this process.