5.1.2　Social Context of Genres

Although social context is seldom examined in contrastive genre analysis,the importance of social contexts in the analysis of genres has been emphasized by theorists(Bhatia,1993;Hyland,2003;Johns,1997;J.R.Martin et al.,1987;Miller,1984;Paltridge,2001;Swales,1990).As highlighted by Hyland(2003),the concept of genre is based on a social view of language use.That is,the use of language is a social event which follows the conventions of how language is used in a situation to meet the expectation of the audience.Therefore,apart from form and content,which are the common focus of language instruction,genre-based pedagogies also emphasize the social aspects of language use,such as the socio-historical context of a community.Hence,genre knowledge is often depicted as multi-dimensional and contains the dimensions of form and content,as well as social context(Berkenkotter &Huckin,1995;Bhatia,2002;Johns,1997;Tardy,2009).Berkenkotter and Huckin(1995)contend that useful genre knowledge in disciplinary communication includes form and content and knowledge of disciplinary culture such as communicative systems(e.g.the peer-review system of research article).Tardy(2009)maintains that genre knowledge not only includes formal and rhetorical knowledge,but also the“less visible knowledge”such as the ideologies of a discourse community(p.19).Her model of genre knowledge has four main components,namely formal knowledge,subject-matter knowledge,process knowledge and rhetorical knowledge.Johns(1997)contends that communicative purposes,roles,context,cultural values and intertextuality,which all belong to the social dimension of knowledge,should be acquired as an additional level of knowledge to form and content in academic literacy development.Bhatia(2002)suggests that the genre analysis with a focus on situated linguistic behaviour and pedagogical needs is only a narrow application of genre analysis,which pays more attention to“the search for generic descriptions suitable for the language classroom”(p.5).This narrow application may have reduced the complex nature of discourse.He proposes to expand the scope of genre analysis to“capture the social and institutional realities of the everyday world”(p.5).

Although the importance of social dimension is widely acknowledged in genre theories,the primary focus of contrastive genre analysis studies is on differences in form and content.To investigate the role of social context,the present study compares the use of moves in 90 opening sections of Master’s Theses written in three local disciplinary communities,namely the Applied Linguistics communities in China,New Zealand and America.We first annotated the corpus with moves and then conducted statistical tests to identify possible significant differences among the three groups.In order to understand the potential for differences in genre use,we investigated the differences in epistemological and social traditions of the three communities.