A Study On The Features Of Literature Review In English M.A.Theses In China Of Foreign Linguistics And Applied Linguistics

As an essential part in theses and dissertations,literature review serves as a bond which connects previous findings and the M.A.students' research.Taking literature review model of academics in O'Connell and Jin's study(2002)as a reference,this study aims to examine the structure in the literature reviews in the English theses of Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics(FLAL)produced by Chinese M.A.students from the January 2015 to December 2017.The theses are 323 in total,which are mainly chosen from 5 universities of foreign language,including: Beijing Foreign Studies University,Beijing International Studies University,Guangdong University of Foreign Studies,Sichuan International Studies University and Xi'an International Studies University.This paper also tries to explore characteristics of Price Index,the number of Chinese and English citations and existing problems in the Chinese M.A.students' English theses literature reviews.The results reveal that:(1)although all the five moves of the literature review structure in O'Connell and Jin's study(2002)can be found in the literature reviews in the corpus,they are disorder.(2)literature reviews in the corpus are insufficient in critical analysis of previous findings and identification of research gaps;(3)time of publications of citations in literature reviews in the corpus distributes mostly in the years before five years and the number of English citations are more than Chinese citations.This study hopes to inspire the research of Chinese students of English academic writing and provide pedagogical implications for students in FLAL on how to write an academically professional literature review for their M.A.theses.