A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Personal Statements Written By Chinese Applicants And American Applicants

In recent years, there has been growing interests in conducting research on personal statement. With the development of Chinese society and globalization, more and more students desire to study abroad. The personal statement, or school application letter, as an academic promotional genre (Bhatia, 1993), serves as one of the most important documents in the school admission process. However, due to the unfamiliarity of this particular type of academic writing, lots of Chinese applicants are rejected by the institution committee because of their undesired personal statement. Up till now,there are only some writing guidance and on-line services for them to turn for help. There has been little comprehensive study on PS writing regarding it as a genre, let alone contrastive analysis.30 personal statements written by Chinese applicants and 30 by American applicants are collected from various channels. The former are labeled as CA samples and the latter as AA samples. The present study is both a qualitative study and quantitative study on the basis of move-strategy structure approach and contrastive rhetoric. Based on Bhatia's models of promotional genres, the author does a preliminary analysis by using five samples from CA and AA respectively. The schematic structures of both samples are obtained. The author does an innovative work by combining the moves and strategies of both samples and calculating the occurrence rate of them. The moves (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) of the discourse structures of these samples in two different cultures are identified and compared strategy by strategy. The GSP analysis is used to describe the obligatory and optional components of the structures. Based on the outcomes of analysis, comparisons and contrasts are made to show the similarities and differences between the personal statements from two different cultures.The main results from this study are: (1) there are 4 moves identified in CA samples and 3 in AA samples. Altogether 12 strategies are identified in the data. They are namely Personal Experience (PE), Growth Environment (GE),Gap-filling (GF),Discipline Interest(DI), Educational Background(EB), Extra-curriculum Experience(EE), Academic Research Advantage(RA), Personal Ability/Trait(PT), School Appreciation(SA), Application Presenting (AP), Claim Reemphasis (CR). In conclusion, there are 5 structure elements are found in CA and AA. (2) GE, GF, EB, SA are unique structure elements identified in PS written by CA. 10 structural elements are identified in PS written by CA, only 7 are identified in PS written by AA. The author also finds reasons to explain the differences from socio-cultural factors.This paper is significant in filling some gaps theoretically with regards to cross-cultural genre analysis and contrastive rhetoric; it also provides some implications practically by providing some useful and helpful suggestions for writers, translators and researchers. The present study is limited as well in some aspects and further researches are encouraged to better improve it.