Study On The Application Of Genre Analysis To English Majors’ Graduation Thesis Writing

As a kind of research papers, the graduation theses of domestic undergraduatesmajoring in English have been an important way to reflect students’ comprehensive abilityacquisition, and to evaluate their academic performance. Driven by many factors such asthe work of undergraduate teaching evaluation and professional assessment of Englishmajors, these graduation theses have received unprecedented attention in China in recentyears. However, there exist a lot of problems in these graduation theses, and a great numberof students are also deficient in genre awareness.With20graduation theses of undergraduates in English Applied Linguistics inNorthwest A&F University (including10primary graduation theses and10secondarygraduation theses) obtained through random sampling as research object, this paper takesthe “move-step” model proposed by Swales (1990) and the structure model of researchpapers in Applied Linguistics summarized by Yang Ruiying (2006) as the theoretical basisand standard respectively, and conducts a quantitative analysis on the macro-structure andmicro-structure of the body part of these graduation theses. The paper aims at enriching theapplication of genre analysis theory on primary and secondary graduation theses in theory,and hopefully it will be helpful for English majors to master the knowledge of genre andbeneficial to thesis writing and teaching in practice. The research questions are as follows:1) Does the body part of the graduation theses of Northwest A&F University inEnglish Applied Linguistics meet the standard patterns or models of research papers? Whatare the problems existing in the graduation theses?2) What are the similarities and differences of the macro-structure and micro-structurebetween primary graduation theses and secondary graduation theses?3) What is the relationship between relevant parts in the graduation theses?The results of the study show that:1) The students’ graduation theses in English Applied Linguistics in Northwest A&FUniversity generally met the IMRD model of research papers and Yang Ruiying (2006)’smodel in Applied Linguistics, but some moves and steps were in a messy order, and“Argumentation” was illogically developed, which indicates students’ poor critical thinking ability and weak genre awareness.2) There were distinct differences in the macro-and micro-structure between primaryand secondary papers. Primary papers were generally composed of4obligatory and2optional (in italics) moves:“Introduction”,“Theoretical Basis”,“Method”,“Results”,“Discussion/Conclusion”, and “Pedagogic Implications”. While secondary papersgenerally consisted of3obligatory and one optional (in italics) move:“Introduction”,“Theoretical Basis”,“Argumentation”, and “Conclusion”. Compared with primary papers,“Argumentation” is the distinctive part of secondary papers. Except “Argumentation”, therewere both similarities and differences in other parts of the two kinds of papers.3) After conducting the frequency information of the moves of “Results”,“Discussion”,“Conclusion”, and “Pedagogic Implications”, we found that communicativeintention conveyed in these parts was overlapping and differed in communication focus:“Results” focused on “reporting results”;“Discussion” focused on “commenting on results”,and its information focused on the comparison of research results, evaluation or analysis ofthe causes;“Conclusion” focused on the summary of the entire study; Some moves andsteps in “Pedagogic Implications”,“Discussion” and “Conclusion”, or even“Argumentation” in secondary theses were overlapped to some extent as well.Afterwards, according to the results reported in the study and based on integration ofmany researchers’ studies, the paper put forward some suggestions to help English majorsdevelop genre awareness and improve the teaching work of English major graduation thesiswriting: on the one hand, to employ the teaching methods based on genre knowledge inEnglish thesis writing class; on the other hand, to introduce the contrastive method betweenEnglish and Chinese discourse analysis in teaching.Finally, this paper discusses the limitations of the research. As it focuses on themacro-structure and micro-structure of the body part of the English graduation theses, theother parts of the graduation theses, such as the part of “Abstract”,“Acknowledgements”,and the linguistic features (including style, sentence structure, tense, etc) are not involved inthe paper. Moreover, the selected data are limited, therefore, research scope of analysis anddiscussion is supposed to be further expanded and larger corpus should be established infuture research.