94 / 2018-07-26 10:10:11

A Study of the Affect in “ Conclusion Chapters” of English Theses by Chinese Graduates of Applied linguistics

appraisal theory; genre

全体主题 > ESP 与语料库及数据驱动教学

Drawing upon Martin & White (2005)’s appraisal theory integrated with Swales’s genre theory, this study tries to investigate the use of Affect on each move/ step in “conclusion chapters” of English Theses by Chinese MA and Phd students of Applied linguistics. This study has built an operational analytical framework for this study and developed three corpora, namely Native Scholar Corpus (NSC), Chinese Master Corpus (CMC) and Chinese Doctor Corpus (CDC). With the reference to NSC, this study explores the use of Affect on the move/ step in “conclusion chapters”of Chinese MA and Phd students' English theses. The findings show that Chinese MA students overused Affect in comparison with the native scholars. Compared with Chinese MA students, Chinese Phd students used more types of Attitude which are closer to native scholars in terms of the frequency. Generally, the use of most Attitude types by the two groups of Chinese graduates were more or less similar to the native scholars. However, their uses of these Attitudinal lexis lacked form variations in terms of Appreciation in comparison with the native scholars.