Genre Analysis On Literature Review Writing Of English Major Undergraduates’ Graduation Thesis In NUC

The study of literature review has received much attention in recentyears. It has become an indispensable part of the process of academictheses or dissertations writing. However, there are still inadequacies onresearch about literature review writing in undergraduates’ graduationthesis of English majors.With the development of genre analysis, which is proposed bySwales and Bhatia, literature review section in graduation thesis hasbegun to raise researchers’ attention these years. Some scholars haveanalyzed and examined the macro structure and micro structure ofliterature review from the perspective of genre analysis. However, thereseems to be little concern over the generic analysis of literature reviewwriting in undergraduates’ graduation thesis of English majors. To betterunderstand the current situation of literature review writing in Englishmajors’ graduation thesis in China, the present study takes literaturereview model of western academics in O’Connell and Jin’s study as the reference and the genre analysis as the theoretical basis. The authorconducted a survey of185theses written by English majorundergraduates from the North University of China in recent three yearswith documentary method, in order to examine the generic features ofthese literature reviews. Yet firstly it is necessary to answer these threequestions:1) what are the main problems in Chinese undergraduates’graduation theses’ LR writing of English major?2) What is the generalstructure of LR section in English major undergraduates’ graduationthesis? Does the general structure follow the standard move structuralmodel of western academic provided by O’Connell&Jin?3) What arethe genre features in the English major undergraduates’ graduation theses’LR section?The results reveal that the general structure model of the students’literature reviews from the North University of China followed theliterature review model in western academics, but little identification ofresearch gap are found. In addition, the results indicate that there aredifferent generic features and writing strategies in the corpus. This result makes the readers have a thorough understanding of the literaturereview of the English major undergraduates’ graduation thesis,furthermore, it provides a reliable reference data for the successfulliterature review writing.