Knowledge Claims Of Discussion Sections In The Field Of Language Learning:Contrasting Master's Theses By Chinese Students And Native Speakers Of English

The Discussion section is indispensable to thesis and dissertation writing,so in academia,there are considerable studies on this section,mainly involving move and step analysis.An overview of the literature has also shown that Discussion sections deal with(new)knowledge claims(Basturkmen,2009;Parkinson,2011;Swales&Feak,2012),but how to make knowledge claims as well as whether writers make and prove their knowledge claims effectively have not yet been discussed extensively.Against this background,the present research attempts to spell out how Chinese students and native speakers of English make and prove knowledge claims in Discussion sections in the field of language learning from a contrastive approach.Two corpora are built to describe and analyze Discussion sections.Adopting the revised model of Yang&Allison's(2003),the thesis examines how knowledge claims are made by student writers.Then,taking citations as a point of departure,it carries out an in-depth investigation into whether knowledge claims are proven effectively.A careful analysis of the data reveals that when making knowledge claims,both sets of students share similarities and yet differences remain.While they adopt similar moves and steps,the way native speakers of English adopt is more diverse.In addition,Chinese students put their own knowledge claims in the background.Besides,both sets of students lack the ability to argue for their own knowledge claims.In general,native speakers of English make and prove their knowledge claims more effectively.This thesis is significant in two aspects:choosing knowledge claims as the research focus can first,provide a new perspective to the study of the Discussion section writing;then,it is significantly helpful in students' thesis writing and supervisors' instructing their students in the field of language learning,in offering references to the compilation of handbooks and guides of academic writing and also in the teaching and learning of academic writing.