| The past two decades have witnessed great interest in genre analysis theory in academic circle. The focus of the framework in the field of applied linguistics in recent years has been on various academic genres, especially the introductory section (introduction) of the research article, which serves the function of opening the whole work. The writing of an introduction, therefore, is a great task, though it is difficult for writers. However, cross-cultural contrastive research on introductions has been rare, especially introductions of longer and more complicated academic texts such as MA and PhD thesis.The research is genre-based and empirical. All together 45 pairs of MA thesis written respectively by Chinese writers and Canadian writers majoring in applied linguistics were randomly collected from the CNKI and the ProQuest. A quantitative analysis was carried out to investigate the macro-structure of the thesis introductions in the framework known as the CARS mode. The results show:(1) Compared with Chinese writers, Canadian writers prefer informative headings and subheadings; (2) Both groups favor to adopt more Movel and Move3 than Move2. Although M1-M2-M3, always presenting with other moves or move cycles, is the dominate move pattern in both corpuses, other varieties, such as M3-M2-M1 and M1-M3-M2, have also been found; Moreover, the average number of move occurrence in the Canadian corpus is larger than that of the Chinese corpus. (3) In terms of the macro-structure, the CARS model cannot be effectively applied to the moves and steps identified in the two corpuses, because both groups tend to favor some steps while ignoring others. Based on the generic structures of the two corpuses and the newly identified steps, a modified CARS model is suggested for MA theses in applied linguistics. The findings of the research are expected to contribute to the contractive analysis on academic discourse and, at the same time, be helpful to MA candidates in the field of applied linguistics.
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