A Comparative Genre Analysis Of English M.A. Thesis Abstracts In Linguistics Between Chinese And Native Students

are the concentration and essence of academic papers.They are brief descriptions of the contents of theses,without annotations and comments.An abstract with a good quality can help readers to understand the main contents of the thesis quickly and accurately.In a sense,abstract plays an important role in arousing the interest of readers to read an academic paper.Therefore,abstract is regarded as an important tool to understand the latest development trend in academic field.In recent years,many scholars regard the research of abstracts as the focus,there are more and more genre analysis about the abstracts of academic papers,but there are few comparative genre analysis of postgraduate thesis abstracts.In order to improve the writing ability of Chinese students’ thesis abstracts,this paper randomly select 50 abstracts from CNKI and PQDD respectively,a total of 100 abstracts,and set up two corpora.Adopting the IMRC(Introduction-Method-result-conclusion)model proposed by Bhatia(1993),and according to Swales(1990)CARS model,this paper analyzes and compares the similarities and differences of the English abstracts of Chinese and foreign M.A thesis from the genre structures,hedges,verb tense,voice and the first person pronouns,and try to analyze the reasons of the differences.The results show that the structure of English abstracts of native English speakers is basically consistence with IMRC model,while the English abstracts of Chinese learners usually adopt the two moves pattern,that is IR model.Therefore,the biggest differences in genre structure is that the lack of method move and conclusion move in the abstracts of Chinese learners’.In terms of language features,there is not many differences in the use of hedges in Chinese and foreign abstracts;As for the use of tense,both of them tend to use the simple present tense;Except for the“method” move,the other three moves are mainly use the active voice;While the first-person pronouns appear less frequently in both corpora,but compared with Chinese learners,foreign postgraduate students use it more frequently.It is hoped that this study can help Chinese academic writers to better understand the genre structure,linguistic features and functions of abstracts,so that they can obtain better skills to read and write abstracts of academic papers.