5.2.2　Genre Analysis

The move model used in the present study was developed from the New Zealand sub-corpus(see Study 1).It contains four moves,namely Move 1 Familiarising Readers with the Field,Move 2 Providing Rationales,Move 3 Establishing a Theoretical Framework,and Move 4 Presenting the Study.Apart from the four moves,the use of metatext,which serves the function of guiding readers through the writing,was also analysed in this study.The China and America sub-corpora were annotated using the same model.There were no cases where the writing in these sub-corpora called for different moves.Thesis writers in China and America also use their opening section to perform the functions of familiarising readers with the field,providing rationales for the choice of research topic,establishing theoretical frameworks and presenting their own research.Genre analysis of the China and America sub-corpora was conducted in a top-down manner,that is,first,move units were identified based on communicative functions;and then the chunk was broken down into steps according to the content described.As reported in Study 1,the inter-coder agreement for the New Zealand sub-corpus is 94%(Kappa=0.93,p＜0.001),which is a very high agreement level.Since the reliability of the annotation scheme has been assessed,it did not seem necessary to further check the inter-coder reliability when annotating China and America sub-corpora.