A Discourse Analysis Of Chapter Introductions In English Business Law Textbooks

Discourse analysis of textbook has been receiving more and more attention fromscholars and researchers. The theory of genre analysis is often employed to conduct theanalysis. This thesis is designed to integrate metasdiscourse into Bhatia's genre analysisapproach to analyze chapter introductions in English business law textbooks.It is noticed that there is often a certain part in an article, a chapter or a textbook which isused to introduce that text to readers. That is what is called article, chapter or textbookintroduction. Using genre analysis, Swales and Bhatia have carried out lots of research intoacademic introduction, and came up with their own generic structures of it. However thechapter introduction in textbook is still not fully discussed.Kopple and Crismore and other scholars have conducted a lot of research intometadiscourse used in various texts, and find that the use of metadiscourse can help readersunderstand the text thus being helpful in imparting expertise knowledge to laymen.Based on Bhatia's analyzing model and Kopple's system of classification ofmetadiscourse, this thesis proposes its own analytic framework, that is, analyzing chapterintroduction in the aspects of move structure and features of metadiscourse. In order to knowhow chapter introductions in English business law textbooks lead students who have littleknowledge about this discipline into the world of business law, this thesis firstly analyzes allthe chapter introductions in the English business law textbook in terms of move structure andfeatures of metadiscourse. And a three-move structure is found, that is, Move 1 - Establishingthe background, Move - Preparing for the chapter and Move - Introducing the chapter. It isalso found that lots of metadiscourse are used to organize the text and help readers understandthe text. Then, five chapter introductions are selected from five sample books which arerandomly chosen from a pool of thirty-one English business law textbooks. They are analyzedand similar results are found. And this analysis further proves that among the three moves,Move 1 is obligatory while Move 2 and Move 3 are optional but Move 3 has anoverwhelming rate of frequency;and the use of metadiscourse does play an important role inorganizing the text, helping readers interpret the material and forming interaction betweenwriters and readers.