PE 39

A Corpus -Based Analysis of Genre - Specific Discourse of TEFL Theses in the Context of Iranian Post-Graduate Students of Payame Noor University

كارشناسي ارشد

آموزش زبان انگليسي

پيام نور رشت

1393

1393/06/23

دفاع شده

xiii,157p.

مسعود خليلي ثابت

شهين شيخ

Abstract , Coopus -based analysis , EAP , Genre , Genre analysis , Thesis

راهنما، خليلي ثابت،مسعود , مشاور، شيخ،شهين

Writing a thesis is the most important part of graduate education and marks the culmination of endeavor, training, research, and writing of the researcher. Moreover, MA thesis is a genre which is very frequently “recontextualized” as an academic article by the EFL researcher. The purpose of this study was to conduct corpus analysis of the genre-specific features of thesis abstracts in a corpus of 50 theses written by TEFL students of Payam-e-Noor university in Tehran in order to find out the most frequently used moves through frequency analysis. Also, a meticulous analysis was carried out to find out the most frequent verb-phrases in the above mentioned thesis abstracts. Thus, a corpus of 50 MA thesis abstracts written in English from 2007 to 2012 was selected for this study. The abstracts were analyzed based on CARS model (Swales, 2004) and especially IMRD model (Swales,1990) reference. Then, the moves used in the abstracts and the sentences related to the same moves, were counted and their frequencies and percentages were mentioned. The results revealed that the majority of the MA students of TEFL in Payam-e-Noor university in Tehran have used the standard IMRD model of the abstracts in their theses. The other finding of this study was the 20 frequent verb-phrases that has been repeated in most of the abstracts in this corpora. So, the findings of the present study are significant for TEFL post-graduate students and novice researchers to improve their academic writing skills for preparing thesis especially abstract section.

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