A Comparative Genre Study On Prefaces Of English And Chinese Course Textbooks

Genre analysis is a conspicuous approach to textual analysis. It seeks to make deep description and elaboration of texts and to give better understanding of text construction. Swales’Move theory and Hasan’s Generic Structural Potential theory have aroused wide attention. Through combining these two approaches of genre analysis, the present study attempts to investigate the generic structure of preface more comprehensively and thoroughly.The main objectives of the present study are:to identify the moves that are commonly used and their respective distributions; to summarize the Generic Structural Potential indicated by the moves; to conclude the similarities and differences in these two aspects between English and Chinese corpora; and to explore the possible affecting factors of the similarities and differences.The present study collected 50 prefaces, respectively,25 in the English corpus and 25 in the Chinese corpus, which covered the fields of literature, education, management, engineering and medical science. Firstly, the moves were classified. Then the moves in both corpora were identified and a reliability test was done to ensure the validity of the classification. After that, each move was interpreted with examples and the distribution of each move was presented. Finally, the Generic Structural Potential was summarized.In the present study, the moves commonly used in preface are:Justification for the book, Creation of the book, Establishing credentials, Description of the book, Usage of the book, Acknowledgement and Ending words. The Generic Structural Potential of preface is: Description of the book is the obligatory move, other moves are optional; Acknowledgement and Ending words follow other moves, while other moves have no fixed positions; Creation and Description of the book are iterative.The results show:(1) the obligatory move is Description of the book and the move of the second highest frequency is Acknowledgement, and this suggests that the authors under both cultural contexts reach a consensus about the contents of a preface; (2) almost no two prefaces have exactly the same move structures and the position of moves are not fixed, and this shows that the authors have freedom in writing; (3) the frequency of Ending words in Chinese is much higher than that in English, and this indicates a more modest attitude of Chinese authors by claiming responsibility for possible errors; (4) the average number of moves in the Chinese corpus is more than that in the English corpus, and this indicates that the move structure of Chinese is more complex and that of English is more schematic; (5) the possible affecting factors for the similarities are common communicative purposes and politeness, and those for the differences are different value systems and cultural contexts.Therefore, the present study can not only enrich the studies on genre, but also throw new light on the application of GSP and move theories and have pedagogical implications for writing. In addition, during the process of genre analysis, attention should be paid to the structures and the underlying social and contextual contexts.