7.5 Limitations and Future Research
The present study aims to explore the variation in the use of moves between and within local communities.It was limited by several constraints.
The sample size of this research is not large enough to generate normally distributed data at the step level.Even at the move level,winsorizing techniques were employed to reduce extreme values in order to meet the requirements of the test of MANOVA.Increasing the sample size of each group could have made the statistical comparison of steps possible.
The research is limited to one discipline(i.e.Applied Linguistics).Given that there is more collaboration in research activities in hard sciences,I do not know if the writing of science and engineering students in the three local communities would demonstrate similar variation patterns as in Applied Linguistics.Further research can be conducted to check the variation pattern in other disciplines.
The sample texts in the New Zealand sub-corpus were collected from two New Zealand universities located in Auckland.At the time of data sampling,with the help of the subject librarian,the researcher only managed to obtain Master’s Theses from two universities in New Zealand.The theses in one of the universities only existed in hard copies.Scanning and optical character recognition were conducted to transform the theses into computer-readable format.The representativeness of the samples makes the generalizability of the findings related to the whole New Zealand community problematic.
This research only examined the individual variation in one uniform community,i.e.China,which is famous for its collective culture.Thus the pattern of reduced variation of the uniform community might be related to the specific culture of this community.Further studies are needed to check the generalizability of the findings on the variation pattern of other examples of a uniform community.In addition,the top-down approach of examining the contributing factors of individual variation may have confined the identification of unexpected factors.A combination of the corpus-based approach and the ethnographic approach may gain a more thorough understanding of the causes for genre variation.Nevertheless,this research offers an initial exploration of individual differences in genre practices within a discourse community.The findings of the study provide empirical evidence against the homogeneous view of community practice implied in many genre-based studies.