A Study Of Generic Structure Of English Academic Book Reviews

The concept of genre originates from works in traditional literary studies. It has been prevalent in literature, sociology and rhetorics for a long time, but it has started to become important in linguistics only recently. Recent works in linguistics have extended the study of genre beyond the literary domain. With the development of text linguistics and discourse analysis, genre analysis has become a powerful tool for an insightful and thick description of texts. Over the last 20 years, a great number of studies on academic writing have been devoted to the research article, in particular, to its structure, social construction and historical evolution. A lot of these studies have concerned themselves with the overall organization of various parts of the research article. English academic book reviews have been a part of the academic landscape for almost 2000 years and evolved as a modern genre in the middle seventeenth century. As a sub-genre of academic discourse, it has received less attention and seems to have largely escaped from linguistic scrutiny due to its unremarkable character as reference for a long time. However, it plays an important role in supporting both the manufacture of knowledge and the social cohesiveness of disciplinary communities. There's little research on the generic structure of English academic book reviews, so it's necessary to make a study of it. Based on the theory of Generic Structural Potential (GSP) and Swales' and Bhatia's well-known models, this thesis mainly explores generic structure of English academic book reviews and reveals the obligatory and optional elements with qualitative and quantitative methods combined.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the study. It includes the research background, research purpose and significance as well as the methodology of study. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical frameworks for the study. It discusses the theory of GSP developed by Halliday and Hasan as well as Swales' and Bhatia's models for genre analysis. Based on the theoretical frameworks in chapter 2, chapter 3 is devoted to exploring the generic structure of the samples randomly chosen from two linguistic journals: AppliedLinguistics and Language. Qualitative study is conducted first to inductively get to the inferred move structure. It is then tested statistically to confirm or disconfirm the move structure drawn from qualitative study. According to the statistical analysis; the moves hypothesized are universal to samples tested. Thus; a 9-move structure for English academic book reviews is set up to fulfil its communicative purposes as follows: Move 1—Generally introducing the book under review; Move 2—Raising the reviewer's central thesis; Move 3—Stating the features of the book; Move 4—Interpreting the definition of key terms or expressions in the book; Move 5—Summarizing and evaluating the content of each part of the book; Move 6—Pointing out the strengths or interesting aspects of the book; Move 7—Pointing out the weaknesses of the book; Move 8— Summarizing the evaluation and Move 9—Recommending the book to the suitable readers. Among them; Move 1; 2; 5; 6; 8 and 9 are obligatory moves while Move3; 4 and 7 are optional moves. The move sequence is not fixed. Move 1; 2; 5; 8 and 9 are relatively fixed while the other 4 moves are relatively flexible. Chapter 4 examines the generic characteristics of English academic book reviews: pervasive use of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse. This is actually determined by the communicative purposes of English academic book review; i.e. informative and evaluative. Chapter 5 reaches the conclusion. It deals with the implication and limitation of the study. It also makes suggestions for the future research. This study will do good to EAP writing and teaching. It will facilitate the international academic communication and contribute to the normalization of writing English academic book reviews.