1.5　Outline of the Thesis

The following chapter presents an overview of genre analysis studies.Chapter 2 and 3 review previous studies in the areas of Genre Analysis and Contrastive/ Intercultural Rhetoric to contextualize the present study in the research field.Chapter 4 describes the development of a move model used in later chapters.Chapter 5 reports a contrastive genre analysis among three local communities,exploring genre differences at the community level.In Chapter 6,I explore the individual differences within each local community,investigating genre differences at the individual level.In the concluding chapter,I reflect on the theoretical,methodological and pedagogical implications of this research.It concludes with the limitations.Possible future research is recommended.