Genre analysis of written confessions in China's tertiary education : an investigation of moves and cross-cultural variation

Abstract

Genre analysis has been established as a relatively mature academic research approach. Constellations of genres have been identified especially in the realms of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes). The current study investigates written confessions in China’s tertiary education, which is, to the best of my knowledge, little known to the academic world as a genre. It aims to identify the move patterns of written confessions as a cross-cultural variation and marginalized genre in the specific Chinese context. The analysis is based on a corpus of 30 cases of written confessions by students of university levels in China. A hybrid of quantitative and qualitative approach is utilized to analyze the data. The research follows the convention of genre analysis proposed by Swales (1990) and then developed by Bhatia (1993), which is a bottom-up format and is mainly text-based and data-driven (Shaw 2005: 258, cited in Gillaerts & Gotti 2005), in order to examine both macro and micro levels of the corpus. The research findings have shown that written confessions have identifiable rhetorical moves and typical lexico-grammatical features. Moreover, this research also sheds light on more explorations on genres of cross-cultural variations so as to enrich and broaden the scope of genre analysis.