5.1　Introduction

Using the move model developed in the first study,this chapter examines the differences in the use of moves in the opening section of Master’s Theses in three local disciplinary communities,namely the Applied Linguistics communities in China,New Zealand and America.The epistemological tradition and social aspects of the three local disciplinary communities are investigated in order to interpret the differences in genre practices among the three communities.The findings of this research can be used to improve understanding of genre practices between local disciplinary communities located in different socio-cultural contexts,and to facilitate intercultural communication between supervisors and L2 postgraduate students at the ESL context.The focus of the study is on genre differences at the community level and differences in community cultures.Individual differences will be examined in Study 3.

In this section,I first review previous studies examining genre differences between language communities to make space for the present study,and then discuss the importance of social context in contrastive genre analysis and the nature of explanation.Finally,I review studies on epistemology and sociology of academic communities in preparation for an explanation of the genre differences identified in this research.