A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Linguistics MA Abstracts Written By Chinese And American Students

Genre analysis has been usually applied into the discourse analysis in recent years.And abstracts,as an important kind of academic discourse,begin to raise extensive interests due to its significance in academic life.However,previous researches mainly focused on investigating the generic structure of the abstracts in certain disciplines and few researches have been conducted in the comparative analysis of the abstracts written by Chinese students and foreign students,which is of great pedagogical significance for thesis writing.This study attempts to make a comparative analysis on graduate abstracts written by Chinese graduates and American graduates,both of whom major in linguistics.The self-built corpus consists of 100 abstracts which are divided into two groups with 50 Chinese Master Abstracts(CMA)chosen from Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure and 50 American Master Abstracts(AMA)selected from Pro Quest Dissertation Database of Full Text in the year 2014 to 2016.Following the Swales' IMRD(Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion)model and move analysis method,the comparative analysis was conducted from the perspective of macro-structure which refers to the generic structure and micro-structure which includes linguistic features like sentence type,tense type first person pronoun and voice.Through the analysis of macro-structure and micro-structure,the differences and similarities between CMA and AMA are found.As for the similarities in macro-analysis,four stable moves(Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion)are found both in CMA and AMA,which is in accordance with Swales' s IMRD model.But differences are presented in the order of move and in the stable steps in Introduction move and Discussion move.In terms of the order of the move,Chinese students tend to use a much complex order,such as repetition,cycle and reversion,while American students prefer to firmly follow the compact order of I-M-R-D.Besides,as for the stable steps found in the corpus,5 more steps are identified in CMA than in AMA in the Introduction move.And Chinese students tend to have one more step “providing suggestions” than American students in the Discussion move.As for the micro-analysis of the linguistic features,similarities are found in terms of tense and voice.It is found that present tense and active voice dominate both in CMA and AMA.But there are differences in the first person pronoun and sentencetypes between CMA and AMA.As for the first person pronoun,Chinese students prefer to use “we” to refer to the author while American students like to use first person pronoun “I”.And in terms of sentence types,in CMA,the number of simple sentences far outnumbers that of complex,compound and compound-complex sentences.But in AMA,the usage of simple sentence and complex sentence is pretty much equal across the board.The current study will offer some insightful pedagogical advice to teachers in thesis writing and help EFL learners have a better understanding towards the generic structure of abstracts and improve their abstract writing skills as well.