A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Doctoral Dissertation Introductions By Native And Non-native Speakers In Applied Linguistics

Introduction, as the beginning section to reveal the theme of the research, has been heatedly discussed in the field of genre analysis during the past four decades at home and abroad. Although a number of interdisciplinary and cross-culture researches have been conducted in the research article (RA) introductions, the contrastive genre analysis of the introductions of Native Speaker (NS) and Non-native Speaker (NNS) doctoral dissertations in applied linguistics still receives little attention.The thesis adopts Swales’ CARS (Create A Research Space) model (1990) to give a contrastive genre analysis of the30introductions of the NS and NNS doctoral dissertations respectively in applied linguistics at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. At the macroscopic level, moves, steps and move cycles are explored. The results indicate that both of the NS and NNS groups construct three Moves in the CARS model,"Establishing a territory","Establishing a niche" and "Occupying the niche", to realize their communicative purpose. With regard to the steps, the use of them has different characteristics in the NS and NNS groups due to the individual and cultural diversities. In addition, the length of the introductions in the NS data is much longer than that of the NNS for the NS scholars prefer to draw on the move cycles in the doctoral dissertations. Besides, citation features, reporting verbs and hedging devices are discussed at the microscopic level. It seems that the NNS and NS scholars are inclined to adopt the non-integral citations to review the previous researches, and simple present tense is frequently used to claim the authority of the citations. Furthermore, the hedging devices are often employed to show the authors’ humble attitude towards the previous studies.The findings show that the individual and the cultural similarities and differences exert much influence on the generic structure and lexico-grammatical choices of the introductions of the NNS and NS doctoral dissertations. Moreover, some particular steps are found in the introductions of doctoral dissertations in applied linguistics, such as "background information","summary of chapter one","stating the questions of research","methodology and data" and "explaining the terms". The findings of the thesis are supposed to contribute to the academic writing of introductions in the doctoral dissertations.