Ma Theis Introductions In Applied Linguistics Written By American And Chinese: A Contrastive Genre Analysis

The genre analysis is firstly established by John Swales in1981, whichinvestigates the rhetorical structure of a language in a specific context. Over the lastthree decades, genre analysis has aroused increasing attention among ESP and EAPresearchers and has been developed as a significant approach in discourse analysis.The research article, as a special genre, has become the battlefield of genre analysis.John Swales (1990) put forward the well-known Create a Research Space (CARS)model when he tries to study and explain the movements in RA introductions. Sincethen, many scholars have conducted the genre analysis on RA introductions.However, most studies focus on the hard science field and few studies have beenfound on Chinese MA thesis introductions in applied linguistics.Enlightened by this research gap, the author has determined to make acomparative study on the MA thesis introductions by American and Chinese students.The theoretical framework of this study is based on Swales’(1990) CARS model,which are more widely used than the modified model. This study aims to (1) identifythe similarities and differences in the generic structure and linguistic featuresbetween the two groups;(2) try to explain the underlying factors of the existingdifferences.In the framework of CARS model, the author builds two corpora of40MAthesis introductions. The quantitative and qualitative analysis is processed from thefollowing two aspects: macro structure level and micro linguistic level. The resultsshow that all the articles generally conform to the CARS model; however, Americanand Chinese authors have employed different move patterns and strategies toperform the communicative purposes of moves and steps. It is found that (1) both thestudents pay attention to establish a territory, in which American students tend tomake lots of literature review while Chinese writers prefer giving more topicgeneralizations;(2) In niche-establishment, American students employ more stepoptions and linguistic words, compared with their Chinese counterparts;(3) The American MA introductions exhibit more cyclicity and use the Move three mostfrequently to declare their study.;(4) The American postgraduates use more citationsthan Chinese students and usually present more comments or summary of theprevious studies.In this study, the author has discovered the similarities and differences betweenthe corpora and will attempt to account for the differences from the sociocultural andeducational backgrounds. It is hoped that this study can benefit the genre-basedpedagogy in China’s MA thesis writing classroom and help Chinese MA thesiscomposite a more qualified dissertation.