Genre Analysis On English Abstracts Of MA Graduating Thesis In Foreign Linguistics And Applied Linguistics

As a written genre, abstracts’ communicative purpose is to generalize or summarize thecontent of the whole research article, introducing the main content of the research to readersand transferring new scientific findings to academia. The quality of abstracts is closelyrelated to the successive publishing of the thesis and can even reflects the academic abilityand research competence of MA students. Writing an abstract is not an easy task fornon-native speakers. In recent years, more and more studies are carried out on abstract genreanalysis. But few studies have been conducted to the genre analysis on MA thesis abstracts inFL&AL.There were about200universities that have granting right of Master’s degree for FL&AL at the end of2011. According to China degree-conferring units roll, most universitieswhich got granting right of master’s degree for FL&AL after2004were distributed inagricultural and technique universities, while universities which got before2004weredistributed in foreign language universities, normal universities and comprehensiveuniversities. According to different classification of universities,200thesis abstracts arerandomly chosen from China Master Dissertations Full-text Database. Swales’ Move-StepModel (1990) is used to examine the macro-structure of the thesis abstracts. As to the microperspective, certain linguistic features, including the use of tenses, voices and first personpronouns are investigated.The findings show that, the macro-structure of selected abstracts is in consistence withthe IMRD model, but the method and result moves are often neglected. And it varies in twoways: one is between universities which got granting right of master’s degree for FL&AL inand after2004and universities which got this granting right before2004, the other is betweenagricultural&technique universities and foreign language universities, normal universities&comprehensive universities. The micro study of specific linguistic features of thesis suggeststhat under the influence of communicative purposes and strategies the use of tense, voice andpronoun varies in different kinds of universities.This study goes under the academic discussion about quality of MA students’ cultivation.It is hoped that the current research findings, with the amendatory CARS model, can giveguidance to RA abstract writing, provide pedagogical implication for thesis writing course and even offer instructions in practice of construction and reformation in foreign linguisticsand applied linguistics.