Genre Of English Resumes: A Systemic Functional Approach

Since 1970s, as the studies on discourse analysis and textual linguistics develop, genre analysis, as a new research field of discourse analysis focusing on macro structure and communicative purposes, has come into being. In the past twenty years, scholars at home and abroad have contributed a lot to the research of genre and genre analysis, which have gained wide attention in the field of linguistic research, ESP research and language teaching. English resume, as one of the most important job-hunting documents, also belongs to ESP. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to conduct the genre analysis of resume and make clear how the mechanism works and how the communicative purposes are realized, which are also the aim of the present study.The main content of this study is composed of three aspects. Firstly, based on meta-function theory, one of the most important contents of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, the author conducts a trial research on the lexico-grammatical, generic structural and non-linguistic graphological features of 35 English resumes written by native speakers. The ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning are explored by studying the transitivity, voice, mood, modality, thematic structure and cohesion of English resumes. Secondly, based on the genre analysis results of Bhatia and Hasan, the author studies the CC, GSP of English resumes and then summarizes a four-move structure of English resumes. Thirdly, the present research also probes into the non-linguistic graphological features of English resumes. In the research, qualitative and quantitative analytical methods are adopted with the help of the tool of Excel 2003.The findings of this study are listed as follows:the transitivity of English resume is mainly realized through material process; the active voice is used frequently to indicate the narrative feature of English resumes; the declaratives clauses are used to make statements and indicate the tone in the resume; nouns, adjectives and verbs with emotional colors and modal auxiliaries are the main expression of modality in the resumes; different elements of the whole resumes are linked with each other with macro theme and hyper theme progression; ellipses are the main cohesion means adopted in the resume; the three aspects of Context Configuration of English resume—field, tenor and mode are clarified, the field is the context of the introduction of the applicant's information, the tenor is the applicant and the employer's contrasting role relationship, and the mode is written languages and symbols; there are 30 elements in English resume,6 of which are obligatory, and the rest are optional; a four-move model is put forward by the author—introducing the candidate, clarifying the objective, establishing credentials, and enclosing references; non-linguistic graphological features of resumes in aspects of "space" and "marking" are also observed by the author in this study.The author intends to make a deep research into the linguistic and non-linguistic features by taking into consideration of the relations among context variables, meanings and functions of English resume as a specific genre, hoping to analyze its inner structure and communicative purposes, thus providing reference and suggestions for the creation and teaching of English resume.