A Comparative Study Of Cultural Values In Chinese And American Bank Profiles From The Perspective Of Genre Analysis

Genre analysis mainly aims to reveal communicative purpose by identifying the “move”. Hofstede’s culture dimensions include individualism vs. collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity vs. femininity. The banking website, as a promotional platform, not only plays an important role in setting up bank image, but also reflects its cultural value orientations.This thesis starts the research with the following questions: 1) what are the generic structures of Chinese and American bank profile? 2) what differences and similarities exist in Chinese and American bank profiles and how to explain these differences from cultural values? 3) how to make the effective bank profiles in English? Based on the Swales & Bhatia’s move-step model, this research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the 30 English samples from American banks and 30 English samples from Chinese banks and find out the differences and similarities. The differences can be explained by Hofstede’s Value Dimensions and Kluckhohn’s Value Orientations.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction; the second chapter reviews some important concepts about genre analysis and bank profiles; the third chapter constructs a theoretical framework for this study, which introduces some classical genre analysis models and culture dimensions; the fourth chapter shows the research questions and research procedures of this thesis; the fifth chapter is the comparative study of cultural values in Chinese and American bank of profiles from the perspective of genre analysis; the final chapter is a summary of the findings of the research, as well as limitations and some suggestions for further research. The research results show that both the Chinese and American bank profiles have six moves. The Chinese bank profiles include Providing general background, Introducing products or services, Illustrating capability, Market positioning, Displaying corporate culture and Calling for cooperation. Among them, the first three moves and move five are obligatory; the fourth move and the last one are optional moves. Six moves of American bank profiles are Providing general background, Introducing products or services, Illustrating capability, Displaying return to groups, Displaying corporate culture and Calling for cooperation. Different with Chinese bank profiles, the first four moves of American bank profiles are obligatory and the last two moves are optional. With the same communicative purpose of building up a favorable bank image and attracting potential customers, the move structures of Chinese and American bank profiles are similar. And the differences between them are because of cultural values, such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance and so on.This thesis aims to find out the generic structures of Chinese and American bank profiles and explore the reasons for the differences of the genre structure from the perspective of cultures for the better construction of bank profiles. This study is expected to have practical significance in writing the English profiles for Chinese and American bank website and provides some references for the writing and teaching of promotional genres.