Genre Analysis of Advisors' Bio Statements on UniversityWebs

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Research
With the advent of the Internet Era, public access to information is not confinedto the traditional media like magazines, newspapers or brochures. In accordance withthe trend, the Internet has become a new mode of information media. Governments,companies, institutions set up homepages to reach the public. Domestic universities,as well, have established their own website with continuous improvement on itscontent and form. The guests of university websites usually pay much attention to theadvisors’ bio statements (or the teaching staff) because reading those bios helpsevaluate the university. The advisor’s bio statement (short for bio) on universitywebsites is the brief introduction to the academic background of the advisor whichconstructs the academic identity to prospective graduate students and other academics.Therefore, the advisor’s bio statement not only serves as a good channel to publicizethe universities’ and teachers’ scientific research quality, but also acts as a medium forinteraction among advisors, potential students and other academics.In recent decades, although much attention has been paid to genre analysis, fewstudies have examined the advisors’ bio statements lest the Chinese ones. Hyland andTse (2012) proposed a move structure of English article bio statements by analyzing600 article bio statements of three disciplines. They mentioned that “the bio is anunsung and disregarded genre which has largely escaped the notice of discourseanalysts” (p.155), so there is still much room left for the current study to investigatethe advisors’ bio statements from both macro and micro level under domestic context.
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1.2 Purposes of the thesis
Through the collection and analyses of 60 samples, the overall goals of thisresearch are to (1) establish the move structure of Chinese advisors’ bio statements, (2)testify the variations in move structure of English and Chinese bio statements and (3)probe into the micro features of all the samples to gain better understanding about thisgenre. To achieve the goals, the current study addresses the following questions:1) In order to fulfill the communicative purposes, what is the move structure ofadvisors’ bio statements in Chinese, and how can it be compared with that in English?2) How can the macro (structural) and micro (linguistic and non-linguistic)features of advisors’ bio statements be explained?
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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter will begin by presenting the core subject, genre analysis. To bespecific, it includes the basic terms and different approaches to it. Then foreign anddomestic studies related to genre analysis are to be outlined. The final section of thisChapter is studies related to genre analysis of advisors’ bio statements which pointsout that there is great room for the current research.

2.1 Genre Analysis
As an insightful and thick description of academic and professional texts, genreanalysis has become a powerful and useful tool to identify the relationship betweenform and function as well as to investigate the internal and external structure ofdifferent types of texts. According to Chandler (1977), “genre analysis situates textswithin textual and social contexts, underlining the social nature of the production andreading of texts” (p.10). Therefore, genre analysis is to identify the schematicstructure, identify the strategies available to allow users to fulfill their communicativepurposes, and identify linguistic choices of the genre to realize the strategies (Henry& Roseberry, 1999).
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2.2 Previous Studies in Genre Analysis
Discourse analysis, as Bhatia (1993) noted, is the study of language use beyondthe sentence boundaries moving from a surface-level description to deep-leveldescription of language use. The early stage sees features of language of textconstruction, but the analyses go beyond the pure linguistic description to a thickerdescription of various aspects of genres. It has progressed through at least four levelsof description: “register analysis, grammatical-rhetorical analysis, interactionalanalysis and genre analysis” (p. 5-12).The first is register analysis by focusing on the lexical grammatical features anddetailed description of language varieties including features of lexis, grammar,context and style. Grammatical-rhetorical analysis, as the second stage, attempts tocatch the relationship between grammatical choices and rhetorical functions inscientific writing. Interactional analysis, the third stage, is to study the interactionbetween language and social meanings, which doesn’t take the social cultural andpsychological factors into consideration.Bhatia (1993) finds the first three stages inadequate in two respects. First, theylack “adequate information about the rationale underlying various discourse-types”such as “insufficient explanation of socio-cultural, institutional and organizationalconstraints and expectations that influence the nature of a particular discourse-genre”(p.10). Second, they pay “little attention to the conventionalized regularities in theorganization of various communicative events” (p.10). In consequent, Bhatia arguesthat genre analysis which combines socio-cultural and psycholinguistic aspects oftext-construction with linguistic insights is powerful and useful.
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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY .......20
3.1 Data Collection .....20
3.2 Research Questions ........21
3.3 Method .........22
3.4 Procedures....22
CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS OF ADVISORS’ BIO STATEMENTS IN CHINESE ......24
4.1 Genre Analysis of Advisors’ Bio Statements at a Macro Level ....24
4.1.1 Move Structure of Advisors’ Bio Statements ............24
4.1.1.1 A Sample Analysis......24
4.1.1.2 The Identification of All the Moves and Steps in the Corpus....27
4.1.2 Variations in Moves of English and Chinese Bio Statements .....32
4.1.3 Interpretation of the Moves and Steps of Advisors’ Bio Statements ....34

CHAPTER IV ANALYSIS OF ADVISORS’ BIOSTATEMENTS IN CHINESE

This chapter sets out to describe the move structure of sixty Chinese advisors’bio statements along with the linguistic and non-linguistic features. With limited space,it is unnecessary to detail the process of genre analysis of all the samples. In the firstsection, genre analysis of an example chosen from the corpus will be given and thenthe analytical method will be generalized to other samples so that the final movestructure will be proposed. In addition to the structure, this section will compare movestructures identified in Hyland and Tse (2012) and that in the present study, along withexplanation of each move with examples. In the latter section, it will attempt to unveilthe underlying linguistic and non-linguistic features of the samples.

CONLUSION

The present thesis has conducted a genre-based analysis on the structure andlinguistic style of Chinese advisors’ bio statements. In this chapter, the findings of thisstudy will be summarized, and implications from the perspective of genre theory andits application will be discussed, along with limitations of this study and somesuggestions for future research.Inspired by Hyland and Tse’s (2012) research, the author conducted the currentstudy to investigate the generic structure of Chinese bio statements. This study built acorpus by sixty advisors’ bio statements from domestic university websites. Thisthesis answers the two questions: 1) In order to fulfill the communicative purposes,what is the move structure of advisors’ bio statements in Chinese, and how can it becompared with that in English? 2) How can the structural and linguistic features ofadvisors’ bio statements be explained?Based on Hyland and Tse’s (2012) move structure, this study described aseven-move structure for the advisors’ bio statements: move one Basic Information tocatch readers’ attention which includes information like name, gender, date of birth,title, position, e-mail and telephone; move two Profile is to introduce the past andpresent experiences about the advisor, usually containing his/her education andworking experiences, teaching activities and community service; move three is aboutthe Research Interest which confines an advisor into certain specialty; move four isthe Publications by which readers can make evaluation on advisors’ academiccompetence; move five is Achievements meaning the recognition gained from fellowscholars or academic committees; move six Enrollment clarifies the specificrequirements the advisor established for admitting new students and finally comes thelast move Contact Information to provide telephone numbers, e-mail or postal addressto get in touch with advisors if necessary.
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