Titles are an integral part of academic journal articles and are of great importance in new knowledge dissemination and scholarly communication in a disciplinary community. Recent years have witnessed an increasing attention given to the study of journal article titles mainly in the field of applied linguistics， focusing on the length， structural constructions and functions of article titles. Article titles from different academic disciplines were also compared in these studies. However， few studies of a comparative nature have reported on the differences of English titles to research articles published in international journals and Chinese language journals. The study reported in this paper aims to fill this research gap by examining English titles from these two types of journal articles in terms of structural constructions （including title length and punctuation marks）， functions embodied in titles and the underlying strategies authors pursue in their composing process. Using the constructs of interdiscursitivity and generic integrity in genre theory， the paper also attempts to probe into the societal and cultural motivation behind the author's composing process of article titles. The two specialized corpora for the study were constructed consisting of Chinese journal article English titles （CJAET） and international journal article English titles （IJAET）. All the titles were chosen from data-based research articles in three respective CSSCI and SSCI journals in the field of applied linguistics from the years 2009〖CD*2〗2013. There are 567 titles in CJAET and 439 titles in IJAET. A frequency analysis was performed on the structural constructions of titles. To examine discourse functions， a list of high frequency words which appear in titles was compiled using AntConc335w. With the help of the list， eight discourse functions of different preference in titles were identified， namely， they are indications of research subject， scope， methodology， purposes， findings， questions， perspectives and duration. The results of the analysis indicate that， while the titles in the two corpora share similarities， there exist distinctive differences. In the IJAET， international authors prefer to use more compound constructions and gerund forms in titles， emphasizing research questions， findings or subjects. The titles in the IJAET also reveal features of author individuality and linguistic variety in terms of structural constructions， which helps to demonstrate the author's attempt to promote research reported in the article proper. By contrast， in the CJAET， Chinese authors tend to use more mono-constructions and fixed nominal constructions in titles， highlighting research subjects and problems， and wasted words such as ″study，″ ″analysis″ or ″exploration″ abound in titles. The frequent use of these waste words in titles in the CJAET is attributed to the Chinese authors' endeavor to conform to ″formal equivalence，″ rather than ″functional equivalence″ when they translate titles from Chinese into English．〖JP〗 A journal article title can be viewed as a sub-genre text within a research article genre. Unlike the structural identity of the Swalesian ″CARS″ model realized by moves for the article introduction part， the article title has its own identifiable structural identity. In terms of language constructions， this structural identity of a title is not realized by moves， but by the key words summarizing the key aspects of the research reported in the article. These key words in forms of nominals or gerunds constitute titles in mono-constructions， compound constructions， questions or full sentence constructions. In terms of language functions， this structural identity highlights such elements as research subjects， findings and perspectives in which the author assumes that members of a target discourse community take a particular interest. Taking into consideration cross-cultural factors and the target audiences， we argue that， in converting Chinese titles into English， using English to write titles instead of translating is preferred. With intense competition among research institutions and universities， the quality and volume of published research have now become a yardstick against which the reputation of an institution is measured and issues concerning an individual scholar's rank， promotion and tenure are decided. In this socio cultural climate， how to compose an appropriate and appealing title to an article has become a crucial strategy for authors while writing up research because this may determine whether the article is accepted for publication or rejected， which is so closely related to the above mentioned benefits of various kinds. We maintain that critical genre analysis of journal article titles will help to shed new lights by providing new evidence in the study of journal article discourse.