Exploring The Generic Features Of MA Theses In Linguistics

English thesis is an important form of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The linguistic research of EAP began in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, however, the focus of EAP research has shifted from register analysis, rhetorical analysis to genre analysis. Early studies on genre could be traced back to Aristotle's classification of genre types, mainly focusing on literary works. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist, expanded the concept of "speech genres" to non-literary fields and initiated the study of the relationship between text/context and semiotic modes. In the past three decades, genre analysis has been a major concern of discourse studies with a particular emphasis on international academic journal articles. However, despite progress made on the genre analysis of these research papers, existing studies on genre have often been constrained by various limitations in research perspectives, methodologies and scopes of research. Specifically, they are narrowly focused, taking a single perspective of the questions addressed; and approaches adopted are simplistic and mostly intuitive, showing little theoretical linkage of their conclusions to other relevant research. Taking these limitations into consideration, a multidimensional approach to exploring the generic features of English thesis is of great significance.To understand the generic features of Chinese thesis written in English, this study integrates theories of genre and takes a combinational approach of textual analysis, contextual analysis and critical analysis to examine the corpus of thesis written by Chinese students and native speakers of English. Questions addressed are:(1) How is the Chinese thesis written in English organized and developed?(2) What linguistic features does the thesis exhibit?(3) What is expected of the thesis by the disciplinary community?Specifically, move analysis is conducted to identify the overall organization of the thesis, and the micro-structure of its introduction and conclusion. Linguistic features of the corpus are measured with computational analytical tools such as Coh-Metrix, Vocabulary Profiler and AntCon. Contextually, literature research and in-depth interviews are used to identify the expectations of English thesis, problems arising in thesis writing and possible causes, which are also analyzed critically.A comparative textual analysis of the corpora shows that Chinese thesis written in English is unique both in its move structures and linguistic features. Macro-structurally, although most theses take the linear macro-structure "traditional simple", yet some of them are developed spirally. Micro-structurally, the construction of theoretical framework seems to be no more than the elaboration of the literature review; much of the introduction focused on the real world instead of identifying a niche or gap in the territory; summary of the results often deviates from the research questions proposed, and the evaluation of the present study and suggestions for future research are somewhat subjective and unconvincing. Lexico-grammatically, the thesis lacks variety in sentence structure and precision of word choice. In addition, the results of textual and contextual analysis also reveals some problems faced by Chinese students in writing English thesis:(1) failing to create a research space or reinforce the research space it has established for the lack of or ineffective development of important moves, (2) infrequently using negations, pronouns(first person in particular) to express the authors' stance and position, (3) tending to have a bias in favor of elite authors or journals. Obviously, it is very hard for the Chinese students to construct the identity of an author.By researching a set of important official documents on thesis, we find English thesis carries various expectations of educational institutions, which are powerful indicators of both the goals of thesis writing and general requirements for a thesis such as its organization, content, language use and mechanics. The results of "One-on-One" and "Focus Group" interviews indicate that there is general consistency of the hallmarks of a good thesis across the community members while they differ a lot on the purpose of thesis writing and how to improve the quality of a thesis. Evidently, there is a mismatch between the disciplinary expectations and the practice of English thesis writing.Investigating the problems Chinese students encounter in English thesis writing, whether there are gaps between levels of expectations or a loss of author's identity, we find one of the main causes is the lack of academic training, which in turn may be due to factors such as inadequate policy environment, curriculum design, ineffective student-faculty interaction, and the lack of the students'autonomy.In essence, genre is a people's response to and expectation of a particular situation. A genre text is a way in which people "get things done" through their use of language in a particular culturally recognized context. From the perspective of context, genre analysis explores the communicative purposes of a genre and explains the rationale for the genre, thus uncovering the hidden socio-cultural and cognitive motivations beyond texts. A thesis genre involves not simply linguistic features of a text or writing skills but a deeper understanding of a thesis as a genre text, which is intimately linked to a discipline's methodology, and structures information in ways that conform to a discipline's conventions, values and ideology. In other words, a thesis genre is purposeful, and is a culturally situated way of doing things in a particular disciplinary community. The present study of the theses'generic features has important practical implications:first, the exploration of the disciplinary expectations of the thesis could offer us useful insights into the inter-relationship of the various facets of institutional contexts and the specific needs of the discourse community members, thereby providing important information for relevant policy making. Second, combinational approaches to addressing Chinese thesis written in English reveal the features of this genre, together with problems and challenges students face in their genre practices, which gives us important feedback not only on English thesis writing, EAP more generally, but also on curriculum design, choice of appropriate teaching materials and teaching methods.This study makes an exploration of thesis genre through "text" to "context", and its significance lies in the following three aspects:(1) It is problem-oriented. Using an empirical approach to analyzing the authentic data from thesis corpuses, the present study explores the relationships between genre texts and the choice of language. This is done with the guidance of insights from genre theories. (2) Taking thesis writing as both a social and discursive practice, this study analyzes the generic features of the thesis genre from textual, contextual and critical perspectives. This approach facilitates a deep understanding of the production, distribution and reception process of the thesis genre. Also, it helps to provide a guidance to thesis writing at different levels, and foster the students'academic literacy. (3) This study focuses on Chinese postgraduate English thesis, an important but underexplored genre, and presents a justifiably complex picture of its features. It is a contribution from Chinese scholars to the worldwide dialogue in the study of genre and academic English.