6.4.1 Types of Communities Based on Individual Var...
Our study adopts the small culture paradigm proposed by Holliday(1999)and groups communities based on the members’social experience rather than essential features such as ethnicity or nationality.The findings shows greater individual variation in the genre practice of the mixed community compared with that of the uniform community and I have suggested that this can be attributed to the influence from the genre conventions of former communities that the international students belonged to.
Factors such as aptitude,personality,learning style etc.associated with individual differences as described in the language acquisition literature are less likely to have an influence on genre conventions,which involve the writing of more advanced students and which are more social than cognitive.Gender might be one variable that could influence the rhetorical structure of the MA theses.The research design was not established to examine gender as a variable,but a post-hoc analysis shows no significant differences in moves by male and female writers.Although the closest to a significant difference is Move 4,Presenting the study,which tends to be longer in the writing of males than females,the situation is not at all clear since there is considerable variation and a couple of outlier females had high values for the standardised length of this move.
The genre conventions associated with communities must,ultimately,be influenced by the practices of expert members of the community,whether directly through instruction and feedback or indirectly through the writing of books and research articles.Previous informal research has indicated,not surprisingly,that supervisors and influential members of the community have both direct and indirect influence on the structuring of academic writing.The present study has some tentative findings on the impact of influential members of the community,which was presented here as a topic for further research.In this study,12 out of 30 writers in New Zealand included their personal experience when familiarising readers with their research,whereas only two students in China and five students in America did so.An informal talk with one of the New Zealand students revealed that the reason for the inclusion of her personal experience in the writing was due to a leading figure in the community who is very interested in the use of narrative enquiry.This academic encouraged her to narrate her own story with respect to the research topic and articulate her position an insider in the research she was undertaking.This is one possible example of the manner in which distinctive genre conventions come about in a local community although no doubt in other communities the influence is more indirect.