4.3.1 Method
4.3.1.1 The Corpus
The corpus used in this study contains the opening sections of 30 Applied Linguistics MA theses from New Zealand.The theses have separate Introduction and Literature Review chapters.The Literature Review chapter goes under various names,such as Theoretical Background and Review of the Literature.Some theses have more than one chapter reviewing the literature.Generally,the chapter(s)occurring following the Introduction and before the Method and having the function of giving an overview of the current body of knowledge on the topic are regarded as the Literature Review in the present study.
This study includes theses written by both native and non-native speakers of English.Following Holliday’s Small Culture paradigm(1999),the researcher does not distinguish writers based on their first language.The researcher assumes that postgraduate students in the same community have similar experience and thus have acquired the same genre knowledge on Thesis writing,regardless of their first language.
Metatexts in the Introduction and Literature Review chapters were identified based on the definition and the functions of metatexts.Twenty-nine out of 30 thesis writers employed metatexts in their opening sections.Extracting the 110 instances of identified metatexts yielded a combined total of 16,006 words.A second coder,a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at a New Zealand university,was employed to analyse 20% of the Introduction and Literature Review chapters and identified the same metatext units as the first author.
4.3.1.2 Procedures of Metatext Analysis
Drawing on the methods of narrative data analysis(Barkhuizen,2011;Pavlenko,2007)and the related procedures of thematic analysis(Attride-Stirling,2001;Boyatzis,1998;Braun &Clarke,2006;2012)and content analysis(Patton,2002),the researcher proposes a framework of metatext analysis,which treats metatexts as narrative data and which can be used to discover communicative functions and content that writers intend to achieve.Thematic networks have two levels,namely codes and themes.In a thematic analysis,researchers use codes to“identify and provide a label for a feature of the data”and use themes to capture patterns of codes across a data set(Braun &Clarke,2012,p.61).The researcher made use of the codes rather than the themes and adopted the following procedures:
1.Identifying metatexts based on the definition and types;
2.Searching for content and its associated communicative functions in the texts.
Contents refer to the items which actually appear in main texts,such as aims and a review of relevant literature,while functions relate to the purpose of introducing certain items and thus are abstract.For instance,in the extract below,the writer states that the literature was reviewed in order to establish a theoretical framework for her/his study.Thus,“a review of literature”is the content used to realise the function of“theoretically fram(ing)the present study”.
This paper,therefore,begins with a review of literature on the different identities and purposes of assessment - with the aim of providing clear definitions and examples with which to theoretically frame the present study.(Booth,2005)
3.Grouping similar or duplicated items;
Thesis writers used different terms to refer to similar content or functions of their opening sections.For example,in the extract above,the author phrased his/her purpose of reviewing literature as“to theoretically frame the present study”,while other authors used different expression such as to“provide(d)the theoretical foundations for this study”(Al-Sahafi,2005).The researcher grouped these items in the same function category and coded it as Establishing a theoretical framework.
4.Labelling words or phrases related with content or communicative functions with codes.
In the extract above(Booth,2005),“a review of literature”was labelled with the content code Relevant studies.The phrase“to theoretically frame the present study”was labelled with the function code Establishing a theoretical framework.Since the purpose of metatext analysis is to explore a writer’s view on the rhetorical organisation of their writing,thesis writers’own words were used to describe their intention in most cases(i.e.in vivo codes).