Title: Contrastive Genre Analysis of English Dissertation Acknowledgements Written by Chinese and American Doctoral Students
Stream: Approaches
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Ruidan Zhang, Shanghai International Studies University, China
Abstract:
Academic writing has been seen as “the fulcrum” (Mohammadi, 2013) of scholarship because of its “enormous relevance to the ways individuals construct themselves as competent academics, build professional visibility, and establish reputations” (Hyland, 2014). Nevertheless, dissertation acknowledgements have long been taken for granted as a part of background (Hyland, 2003) and its value as an academic genre has been underestimated (By genre, we mean the idea that a type of text which fulfills a certain purpose will employ conventionalized forms that are recognizable to members of the same community (Bruce, 2016)). Meanwhile, newcomers are often confused by what conventions they should accommodate in academic writing and EFL/ESL students encounter more problems as writing conventions in English sometimes differ considerably from those in their first languages. Thus, the present study will employ ESP approach of genre analysis, Swales’ move-step analysis in particular, to analyze the English dissertation acknowledgements written by Chinese and American doctoral students in the field of Literature and Linguistics (as Chinese doctoral students in this field are the most advanced English learners), seeking to figure out (1) the generic structures of Ph.D dissertation acknowledgements; (2) the communicative purposes each move or step conveys; (3) the linguistic features are employed to convey the communicative purpose; and (4) the differences between these two groups. The study is a corpus-based study: 60 acknowledgements written by Chinese students are selected from CNKI while 60 acknowledgements written by American students are selected from ProQuest Dissertation Database.
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