A Genre Analysis Of The Chairman's Statement In Corporate Annual Reports

Regarded as a recent development in discourse analysis, genre analysis is evolved from the surface-level description of language to the deep-level explanation and has concerned itself most with describing the higher-level organization and structures of written or spoken texts, aiming to study their communicative purposes and strategies in using the language. Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis, the present research investigates the Chairman's Statement in Corporate Annual Reports as a branch of promotional genres among colony of professional discourses. After analyzing the different moves manipulated by expert writers of the Chairman's Statement within the framework of the Swalesian School, we come up with its move structure and prove that it can be considered as a promotional genre based on the communicative purposes it sets out to achieve. Then based on Hasan's model, we probe into the generic structure potential of the Chairman's Statement by identifying its obligatory and optional moves together with the underlying reason for such a format and conclude that: in order for a text to be considered as a Chairman's Statement, it usually contains obligatory moves such as "establishing credentials", "results announcement", "offering incentives", "indication of prospects" and "ending politely", so the obligatory textual moves of the Chairman's Statement is genre-defining. Meanwhile, it is also open for optional moves that are mainly catering to specific needs of a company.With the implications from genre theory and genre analysis conducted in this research, a genre-based ESP teaching approach is proposed at the end of the thesis, thus shedding new lights on China's ESP pedagogy, particularly on developing ESP materials for on-the-job corporate training.