Genre Analysis Of Chinese And English Resumes From Intercultural Perspective

Resume, as an essential document for self-promotion, besides laying stress on personal skills, education background and work experience, reflects an applicant’s cultural value orientations. By conducting a comparative analysis between Chinese and American resumes, the present paper aims to find the differences lying in their cultural values and the tentative reasons behind.The paper adopts Hosftede’s Cultural Value Dimension Theory and Edward T. Hall’s High and Low Context Culture Theory as the theoretical basis for the analysis. The corpus is composed of 100 native resumes, 50 in Chinese and 50 in English, collected from various HR departments and job-hunting websites. Covering Chinese and American governments, state-owned enterprises, private enterprises and etc.The study is developed under the guidance of genre analysis; it is mainly based on Hasan’s Generic Structure Potential Theory, and complemented by Swales Move-Step Structure. It first clarifies the communicative purpose and contextual configuration of both Chinese and English resumes and then it contrasts and compares their content differences with the help of Hasan’s GSP theory and data analysis.Major findings lie in the differences between both obligatory elements and optional elements specifically, and obligatory elements such as the natural attribute and the social attribute in Chinese resumes are excluded from English resumes; the optional element such as the family background, which is unique in Chinese resume, appears in 48% resumes, while career reference, the unique optional element in English resumes, shows up in 38% samples.Resume differences demonstrate the genre diversity, and further reflect the cultural diversity, which is rooted in different cultural values. A conclusion is made on the basis of cultural value theories that Chinese resumes are driven by collectivism which highlights collective identity, indoor unity and emotional attachment; English resumes are effected by individualism which emphasizes individual rights, freedom, equality and independence; Chinese resumes communicate in high contextual communication, while English resumes adopt low contextual communication; the power distance in Chinese resumes is higher than that in English ones.To sum up, cultural values, to some extent, influence both Chinese and English resumes. With the tendency of economic globalization, the traditional eastern cultural values are undergoing the impact of western ones, which will probably result in the change of resume content in future. And the future resumes can inevitably reflect the cultural value fusion.