Genre Analysis Of Personal Statements From Systemic-functional Approach

Personal Statement is a brief and focused essay about one's background, academic achievement as well as his or her future goal of study, research and career, and is frequently required for applicants to universities, graduate schools in western countries, particularly in U.S.A and Canada, etc. In present China, there is an increasing number of students, who are applying for scholarship and admission to graduate schools of overseas universities. Against such background, the linguistic research on Personal Statements (PSs) has come into being. Up till now, there are only several introductive essays or books about personal statement writing. There has been little comprehensive study on PS writing regarding it as a certain kind of genre, and employing applied linguistic researching method. Therefore, this is the motivation of the present thesis.A corpus of 40 samples of English personal statements is employed as the subject and data for the analysis. 20 texts are written by Chinese candidates, another 20 by English native speakers mainly from Britain and U.S.A.From systemic-functional perspective, the thesis conducts a genre analysis by combining Hasan's GSP model (Generic structural potential) and Transitivity of Halliday's metafunction theory. The study is aimed at throwing light on shared features of PS at the generic textual level and lexicogrammatical level, and investigating distinct writing strategies adopted by both Chinese candidates and English native applicants in a comparative manner.The research reveals that the GSP of PS consists of 10 generic elements, among which the Motivation of Application (AM),Practical Experience (PE) as well as Restatement of the claim (CR) are the obligatory elements and the rest full into the optional category. A possible overall GSP of PS, thus, is formularized. The analysis on Transitivity indicates that clauses featuring various processes are employed to meet the specific requirements of each generic element. The statistics also shows that Chinese applicants are liable to take advantage of clauses characterizing mental processes rather than relational processes to establish an emotional tie to move and persuade the reader. On the contrary, English native speakers tend to create an objective view under the help of employing clauses of relational process. Based on the above researches, the thesis also finds the distinct features towards textual organization and writing strategies of PS adopted by both Chinese students and English native applicants respectively, and provides further explanation of the cultural origins.The research within the thesis confirms the feasibility of integrating Hasan's GSP model with Halliday's metafunction theory to the analysis of PSs. It may turn into the guidance towards PS writing for Chinese students and may cast a pedagogical significance in the teaching of cross-cultural communication.