A Corpus-Based Investigation Into The Use Of Reporting Verbs In The Literature Review Section Of M.A. Theses

It is generally acknowledged that reporting plays an indispensible role in academic writing, especially in the literature review part. In academic contexts, writers should clearly and effectively present their proposals in detail. Through reporting others’opinions, one can make clear the research background of the current study, figure out what has been discovered on the topic of the present research, find support for his position, make his paper convincing and point out inadequacies of other researches, thus providing his thesis with a sound theoretical basis for further study.The great importance of reporting in academic discourse has aroused linguists’ vast interest in making a thorough inquiry into the reporting verbs used in academic papers either written by Chinese English learners, undergraduates and more advanced learners like postgraduates or by native English speakers like college students in English-speaking countries and linguistic scholars. Although reporting in academic writing has been intensively studied both at home and abroad, much attention has been focused on its distribution in the overall pieces of writing or specific parts like the Introduction part and the Conclusion part, few researches have been done in the literature review part of academic papers. Therefore, on the basis of teleology and relevant reporting theories, the present study will devote itself to the reporting verbs in the literature review part of M.A. theses and the author intends to make a comparative study between Chinese postgraduates majoring in English and linguistic scholars for whom English is their first language. In view of this, the author randomly selected35M.A theses from CNKI (i.e. China National Knowledge Infrastructure). All these theses were written by postgraduates majoring in linguistics and applied linguistics from College of Foreign Languages of Tai Yuan University of Technology. At the mean time,200journal papers written by English-speaking scholars were collected from Elsevier Science Direct, published in highly-praised and widely-recognized international English journals, such as English for Specific Purposes, Teaching and Teacher Education, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing etc. Only the literature review part in the collected theses is extracted for further study. Through conducting a contrastive analysis of the two corpora, the current researcher aims to find answers to the following questions:1) What are the characteristics of reporting verbs, reporting patterns and tenses of reporting verbs in M.A. theses written by Chinese postgraduates majoring in English?2) What are the similarities and differences in the use of reporting verbs between Chinese students and native English speakers?The result reveals that both of them are aware of the purposes of literature review writing. They make use of a large number of reporting verbs, various reporting patterns and interchange between tenses of reporting verbs to look back to the previous work, to relate the current research to previous studies, and to make a generalized and critical summary of previous work. However, there exist some similarities and differences in the use of reporting between the two groups of academic theses composers, which are listed as follows:1) the analysis of the general distribution of reporting verbs in the two corpora shows that reporting verbs account for1.42%and1.46%of the total words in CPMATC and NESJAC respectively, implying that advanced English learners have noticed the importance of reporting;2) Chinese students prefer discourse verbs and research verbs to cognition verbs in reporting;3) It is found that some certain discourse verbs are used differently in the observed corpus and the reference corpus. For example, hold, conclude and describe are more frequently used in M.A. theses; while suggest, argue and note are commonly found in journal articles. In addition, some verbs like put forward, declare and propose, which are used by Chinese students, do not appear in the reference corpus;4) More research verbs of process are used in the observed corpus than in the reference corpus, which indicates that compared with native reporters, Chinese students focus more on the research process than on the research findings;5) Cognition verbs, though they rank the last among the three kinds of reporting verbs, are used quite differently between the two groups of writers. For instance, think, the most frequently used cognition verb by Chinese postgraduates, account for only10.60%of all the cognition verbs in the reference corpus. Whereas, expert reporters use focus on4.5times more frequently than advanced English learners in China;6) Chinese postgraduates tend to make more positive reporting and less negative reporting than expert writers do;7) In M.A. theses by Chinese students, there lacks a variation in reporting patterns. Integral reporting pattern and reported researcher as subject take a dominant percentage because they feel that this may contribute to the authority of the present research;8) In the choice of reporting tense, Chinese reporters show a great preference for the past simple tense to the present simple tense and present perfect tense.On the basis of the findings, the present researcher offers four suggestions for the teaching and learning of academic writing in China:enhancing English learner’s awareness of the importance of academic writing; developing students’consciousness of reporting and introducing the knowledge of reporting; providing numerous reporting verbs, instances and enough writing practice; encouraging students to form the habit of collecting reporting verbs and patterns.