The Speech Functions In Examiner Reports On M.A.theses In Applied Linguistics

Examiner reports,as the product of examining graduation dissertations,play a significant role in determining whether candidates could obtain masters’ or doctors’ degrees.Therefore,examiner reports have captured great attention from researchers.And,Kumar and Stracke’s model(2007)which was derived from Holmes’ s theory(2013)of speech functions,has been applied in examiner reports.Based on this analytical model,lots of studies have been conducted overseas.However,in China,few researchers carried on studies of examiner reports of examining masters’ theses.The purpose of this study is to explore the distribution of three major speech functions---the referential function,the directive function,and the expressive function in examiner reports of M.A.theses in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics,based on the Kumar and Stracke’ s model(2007).This theoretical framework comprised the above three basic speech functions and each of the three functions contains 3 sub-functions;that is,editorial,organization and content for the referential function,suggestion,question and instruction for the directive function,praise,criticism and opinion for the expressive function.In this study,77 examiner reports written by 7 experienced external examiners were collected as the data.First,after coders reviewing,according to a complete meaning,the raw material was dissected into 1280 comments to do an in-depth analysis.Second,based on the theoretical framework,each report was analyzed and coded.Third,after running the Excel,quantitative results were obtained.The major results are shown here.Among referential comments,content comes the first place with 73.67%,and editorial poses the second place with 16.93%,as well as organization owns the lowest percentage(9.40%),which means that examiners usually focus on content.Within the directive function,the percentage of suggestions is the highest(67.57%),followed by questions,taking 22.16%,and the lowest percentage is instructions(10.27%).That is,examiners concentrated on giving studentssuggestions.As for the expressive function,criticism takes 55.58% as the first place,opinion takes 40.7% and praise takes 3.72%.Examiners usually express their negative comments and opinions.The current study has some implications.First,examiners should try to keep a balanced use of different functions to motivate students to make progress.For example,examiners could take advantage of directive comments and expressive comments.Second,by writing and reading examiner reports of theses,examiners and students could communicate with each other.Then,setting up a potential interactive relationship is beneficial for candidates to complete high-qualified theses,improve academic writing competence,become good researchers,and step into academia eventually.