A Corpus- Based Analysis of Genre-Specific Discourse of EFL Thesis in the context of Iranian Post-graduate students of Islamic Azad University

Writing has been always a difficult and challenging task for many academic researchers and starting and writing a thesis is a challenging task. In addition, MA thesis is a genre which is very frequently recontextualized as a research article by the novice researcher. The objective of the current investigation was to conduct an analysis of the genre-specific features of abstracts in a corpus of thesis written by TEFL students of Azad University in Tehran, in order to specify the similarities and differences in the authors’ use of moves. This study mostly focused on the verbs employed in the abstracts of MA students’ theses written in 2017 to 2018 in two Islamic Azad universities of Tehran. About 20 MA theses abstracts were selected for this study. These abstracts were analyzed based on IMRD model (Swales 1990). The Moves employed in the abstracts and the sentences related to the same Moves, were counted and their frequencies and percentages were mentioned. The findings revealed that the majority of the MA students of TEFL in Azad University in Tehran have used the standard IMRD model of the abstracts in their thesis. The larger part of the abstract texts is the Move Method, which should be paid more attention. The other finding of this study was the 20 mentioned frequent verb phrases that have been repeated in most of the abstracts in the corpus.

Keywords:

genre , genre analysis , EAP , corpus-based analysis