Orality In English Ma Theses By Chinese And English Writers: A Contrastive Analysis

Research thesis, as one kind of academic discourse, has generatednumerous concern among linguistics research field in recent years. Butthe phenomenon of orality in academic thesis has not received dueattention. This study aims to empirically investigate the extents of oralityin the introductory chapters of English-language research thesiscomposed by Chinese MA candidates majoring in the field of appliedlinguistics and their counterparts in American universities, with referenceto characteristics identified in previous research. The corpus, whichconsists of30samples of English introductory sections composed byChinese MA candidates and30samples of English introductory sectionscomposed by American MA students, is examined from the perspectivesof writer-reader visibility, lexical measures and syntactic patterns andresults show that in general, compared with their American counterparts,Chinese students tend to show greater tendency of orality in their thesiswriting in the way that: they tend to overuse the first person plurals andunderuse the words from AWL (Academic Word List), and prefer shorter,simpler and there-be structures while underuse passives. The orality inChinese students’ theses may stem from the influence of Chinese cultureand Chinese ways of thinking, as well as their proficiency in academicwriting. The findings of this study are supposed to offer pedagogicalsuggestions for Chinese writing teachers and student writers in terms of academic style, especially the formality of academic genres.