A Genre Analysis Of The Discussion Section Of Ma Theses By Chinese English Postgraduates

Graduate students majoring in Applied Linguistics in China are required to write a thesis in English for a partial fulfillment of the requirements for their M.A. degree. However growing literature reveals that, as EFL learners, these graduate students often experience difficulties in the writing of this genre. The difficulties not only lie on the sentence and paragraph level, but also in understanding and meeting the genre requirements of the thesis. The present study conducted a genre analysis of discussion sections of MA theses written by Chinese postgraduates majoring in applied linguistics.MA theses with separate discussion sections are collected from China Doctor/Master Dissertations Full-text Database (CMFD) between the year 2002 and 2008. Then 22 out of the 156 are randomly chosen. A corpus is then built up consisting of discussion sections of the 22 theses, totaling 55, 567 words. Based on Yang and Allison's framework of analysis, the generic structure of the MA theses in applied linguistics written by Chinese students was analyzed. The scheme developed form the analysis of the data is then compared with that of Yang and Allison's (2003). Through this comparison, the deficiencies of the generic structure of Chinese MA theses are also revealed.Through the data analysis, 12 moves are identified in the generic structure, with five of them not concluded in Yang and Allison: Reference to previous research, Making inference, Raising a question, Summarizing discussion, Indicating a gap. In the generic structure, the most frequent three moves are----Move 4: Commenting on results, Move 2: Reporting results and Move 8: Reference to previous research; and the three obligatory moves are-----Move 1: Information move, move 2: Reporting results and Move 4: Commenting on results. In Yang and Allison's framework, however, only Move 4'Commenting on results'is obligatory. Compared with Yang and Allison's framework, the following generic deficiencies are in the discussion sections of the MA these are identified: absence of important moves (Move 8: Reference to previous research), appearance of dis-preferred moves (Move 10: Raising a question and Move 12: Indicating a gap), overuse of infrequent moves (Move 1: Information move and Move 7: Deductions from the research) and other kinds of deficiencies.This paper firstly describes generic structure of the MA theses written by Chinese postgraduates, then analyzes each move and investigates the deficiencies in generic structures, thus confirming and enriching Yang and Allison's framework of analysis. It sets a good example and provides a model for genre analysis of discussion sections. This study can help writers of MA theses and teachers understand the structure and characteristics of discussion section and it can also shed light on the teaching and writing of this section.