7.3.2 Rethinking the Grouping Criteria of Contrast...
Contrastive genre analysis is one of the important methods for investigating intercultural genre knowledge.By comparing texts of the same genre written in different communities,researchers or learners can identify variation of genre practices between communities.The criteria of how the contrast groups were formed vary among contrastive genre analysis studies.As reviewed at the beginning of the second study,previous studies often use the language of the samples or the writer’s first language as the grouping criteria.Journals in which the texts were published were also used as the grouping criterion in some studies.The present study proposes that the local community,a concept based on Holliday’s small culture paradigm(1999),may serve as a better criterion in contrastive genre analysis.
7.3.2.1 Small Culture Paradigm and Contrastive Genre Analysis
The findings of the present study support the adoption of the small culture paradigm in doing contrastive genre analysis.As mentioned above,the small culture paradigm is associated with cohesive behaviour,whereas the large culture paradigm is related to essential features such as ethnicity(Holliday,1999).Previous genre analyses,which contrast writings in different languages written by native speakers(Language A vs.Language B)or compare English writings written by native speakers of English and non-native speakers(NSE vs.NNSE),mainly follow the large culture paradigm,grouping writings based on authors’first language or ethnicity,which are essential features that authors are born into and fixed.Although significant differences in genre conventions were identified among the Applied Linguistics communities of China,New Zealand and America,the present study did not find significant differences between Chinese students in New Zealand and other students in the local community,nor between Chinese students in America and other students in the local community,suggesting that overseas Chinese students may have acquired their local genre conventions.The findings of the present study corroborated those of Römer(2009),who compared the use of phraseological items between the writing of NS and NNS apprentice academic writers as well as between apprentice and expert academic writers.Since noticeable differences were observed between apprentice and expert writers rather than NS and NNS apprentice writers,Römer suggests that nativeness is a less important factor to consider in the research of advanced academic writing than expertise.
Since the 20 overseas Chinese students all did their undergraduate studies in China and almost all undergraduate students in Arts are required to write dissertations to get their bachelor’s degree,they have knowledge of the genre conventions of the Applied Linguistics community in China.However,the findings of the present study suggest that the 20 overseas Chinese students acquired some new genre knowledge from the current community since their writings share many similarities with the rest of the students in the same local community.Therefore,as suggested by Holliday,individuals’cultural knowledge(in this case,genre knowledge)is dynamic and may change according to individuals’cultural experience.The present study shows that there is no absolute relationship between one’s ethnicity and genre practices,suggesting that small culture paradigm makes more sense in the examination of genre conventions of a community.
In sum,the findings of the present study show that the genre practices of Chinese overseas students align with students of the same local community rather than Chinese students located in other communities,indicating that the genre conventions of a local community exert greater influence on individual’s genre practices than their ethnic background.Therefore,when examining genre conventions of a particular community,the writing of members of non-native speakers may be as representative as native speakers and thus it is perhaps not necessary to only include native speakers’writing in contrastive genre analysis.
7.3.2.2 Local Community
As mentioned above,though the small culture paradigm breaks the association between nation/ethnicity with culture,it does not deny that people in the same country or of the same ethnicity may share similar experiences and thus form a community of cohesive behaviour.On the contrary,since people who live in the same country share similar experiences,their behaviour is bound to be influenced by the same set of socio-cultural factors.The fundamental difference between large and small culture lies in using essential features or cohesive behaviour to define a community.
Although the present study did not find significant differences between overseas Chinese students and their peers in the same local community(i.e.the Applied Linguistics communities in New Zealand and America),the present study did reveal a significant difference in the genre conventions of the three local Applied Linguistics communities(V=0.46,F(12,166)=4.12,p＜0.001),indicating that national variations of a disciplinary community does exist at the local community level.In other words,no significant differences were identified at the individual level within the same local community,but significant differences were revealed at the local community level.Therefore,previous contrastive genre analyses do have a point to contrast the genre conventions in different nations.
A local community refers to the intersection of a disciplinary community and a national community(see Figure 17).The present study compares the genre conventions of three local communities,namely China,New Zealand and America local communities.They are the intersections of the Applied Linguistics disciplinary community and the three national communities.The concept of local community is formed on the basis of the small culture paradigm in that the members of the community are identified according to cohesive behaviour,in this case,genre practices,rather than nationality or ethnicity.
Figure 17 Local community
In addition,the present study is perhaps one of the first major investigations into individual differences in genre practices.The method of corpus-based analysis of individual differences in genre practices reported in Study 3 can be used in future research in this area.For instance,the influence of learner factors such as gender,motivation and age on genre practices can be examined through corpus comparison.Line charts(see Figure 18)and discriminant analysis can be used to explore the genre variation patterns of a group of writers.