Generic Structure Of Literature Reviews In English-Language Dissertations Of Applied Linguistics By Chinese Ph.D. Candidates: A Contrastive Perspective

As research in the field of genre analysis progresses,longer texts such as theses or dissertations for degrees began to interest genre researchers.The available literature shows that significant cross-disciplinary variations in the macro-structure as well as components of the document-titles,abstracts,introductions,and conclusions-have been discovered among theses and dissertations composed by candidates from different research fields.However,there seems to be little concern on the important and indispensable part of literature review in Ph.D.dissertation,which shows the writers' understanding of a particular field and the significance of their researches.Besides,the several studies on literature review section mainly focus on native speakers' Ph.D.dissertation while leaving non-native speakers' similar work untouched.This study investigates a data-driven corpus composed of literature reviews from 20 Chinese students' English Ph.D.dissertations in the filed of applied linguistics in terms of macro textual organization and micro linguistic expressions, taking Kwan's(2006) model of rhetoric structure of literature review as reference. Confirming the applicability of Kwan's model to Chinese students' literature review, the results also show significant disparities between LRs composed by the two groups of Ph.D.candidates:1) difference in introductory and concluding texts of a LR;2) different choices as well as frequencies of each move and strategy in Kwan's model;3) distinct combinations of moves and strategies in the thematic units of the body part. The in-depth reasons for these disparities root in different cultural beliefs and academic traditions of China and Western countries.In light of the identified generic structure of literature review from Kwan's model and distinctive features discovered in the present corpus,pedagogical implications are provided for both native and non-native speakers in applied linguistics as to how to write an academically acceptable literature review in Ph.D.dissertation.