| As a branch of discourse analysis, genre analysis which stemmed from literaryfield has transferred its study trend into linguistic field and tried to transcendsuperficially simple linguistic description to profound construction strategies ofdiscourse and its socio-cultural factors and cognitive factors. During the developmentprocess of genre theory, New Rhetorical (NR) School, Australian Systemic FunctionalLinguistic (SFL) School, and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) School are formed.Among these three schools, ESP school has formed great impact on linguistic fieldstrongly and attracted many scholars. At the same time, the rich language phenomenain ESP are enriching the genre theory gradually. Beginning from communicativepurpose and discourse community, genre analysis attempted to study conventions andrules of a certain type of discourse and revealed the construction basis to provideconventional guidelines for users, especially non-native language users. For this, genreanalysis theory is widely adopted in ESP teaching and learning.The present study collected30personal statements in application essays tobusiness schools in western English-speaking countries. All applicants are non-nativespeakers of English and all Chinese students. The study adopted Bhatia’s seven-stepapproach to genre analysis, promotional genre move structure, and Hasan’s genericstructure potential modal as theoretical foundation and made qualitative analysis andquantitative study under the help of corpus analysis software, AntConc. The aim of thestudy is to figure out move structure and generic structure potential of personalstatements and concluded their linguistic features simply. The research results indicatethat the generic structure of personal statements consists of6moves: Explainingreasons and intentions of applying (obligatory), Establishing credentials (obligatory),Presenting personal qualities (optional), Stating future study or career plan or goal(Optional), soliciting response (optional), and Signature (obligatory). Every move has1to3steps to realize its individual purpose and the sequential relationship amongmoves presented some features. In linguistic level, lexical use and purposes also hadsome unique features.Through constructing a small corpus to conduct genre analysis, the present studyhas not only combined corpus study and genre analysis perfectly but also enriched the research achievements of promotional genre analysis. The peculiarity of the selectedcorpus could provide writing guidelines for domestic graduates who want to furthertheir study in English-speaking countries and impose great implications on thepedagogy of ESP. |
