A Comparative Move Analysis Of English M.A. Theses’ Abstracts By Postgraduates In China And Foreign Countries

With the academic development of comprehensive exchange and thoroughcommunication between China and abroad, more Chinese academic articles are receivedand published in international journals. English, skeletonized section of an article, exhibitsreaders a quick acquisition of an article’s main content and structure and plays a role asruler, measuring whether the article fulfills standards of international journals or not.Recently, studies of academic English abstracts distribute mainly on genre and linguisticfeature analysis in order to reflect overall structure and arrangements of abstracts.Rhetorical move is discourse unit of a text, functions of which integrate discoursestructure of it. In academic field, different genre schools put forward characterized movepatterns, such as Bhatia’s IMRD model, Santos’5-move-model, Swales’ CARS model,etc., which has been and is favored and developed by their followers and supporters.Previous studies of abstract genre analysis is undertaken in unitary language background,different language backgrounds analysis later emerges and draw much attention. However,it emphasizes more on cross comparison of single discipline and lack of typification. Thisthesis sets out to conclude similarities and differences of three disciplines: Arts, Scienceand Engineering in the same and different language backgrounds and finds out certainreasons of such situations.Based on self-established corpora, the author selects randomly90abstracts ofChinese and foreign postgraduates’ theses in databases CNKI and ProQuest respectively:English, Mathematics and Mechanics,30abstracts of each, altogether180abstracts fortwo parallel corpora. Bhatia’s IMRD move model is employed for corpora’s coding.Guiding by vertical comparison in unitary language background and cross comparisonunder different language backgrounds, quantitative analysis methods-Independent T-testand Kruskal-Wallis is used for samples’tests. Detailed figures layout explicitly differencesof two corpora. It turns out that abstracts length and structure of two corpora differ greatly;extent of their obeying the IMRD model isn’t the same. Inside the two corpora, exhibitionsof three disciplines distinguish.Vertical comparison: abstract length, sentence and paragraph quantity of Chinesepostgraduates bare little difference, which is opposite of instability in foreign one. Only small percentages of abstracts follow the4move model,3and2moves in more popularpattern in two corpora with various expressive ways. Disordered move and embeddedmove exist in two corpora. Method move overwhelm in four moves in Chinese thesis’sabstracts, moves of foreign abstracts distribute evenly in four moves. Cross comparison: inMechanics, Method move differs in two corpora; distinguishes exist in Introduction andMethod move in Mathematics and Method and Discussion move in English. Throughcomparison between two corpora and three disciplines as well as possible reasons from theauthor, the study hopes to enlighten on English thesis writing and puts forward advice tothe internationalize of Chinese high-level education.