A Genre Analysis of Rhetorical Moves in MA Theses Written by Students of TEFL and Nursing

Within the academic genre, an MA thesis is compulsory for students to complete their postgraduate degree. By focusing on the relationships between text elements, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) uses clauses as its building blocks and connects them in a hierarchical manner through rhetorical relations. These relationships are described in their model in terms of how they affect the reader. The present study intended to compare the introduction and literature review sections of master's theses written by Iranian postgraduate EFL and Nursing students. The corpus included 40 MA theses written by Nursing students and 40 written by TEFL students from four branches of Fars Province Islamic Azad University. A descriptive corpus-based design was used in this study. Swale's (1990) CARS model for the structure of the Introduction and Chen and Kuo's (2012) model for the Literature Review sections were adopted. To investigate the (in)significance of the differences between the moves and steps used in TEFL and Nursing MA theses, a series of chi-square tests were conducted. Different steps were used in the final papers from both disciplines, and significant differences were found between the steps in the Introduction and Literature Review sections. The results of this study can help post graduate students learn how to write their theses. Scholars who wish to become journal reviewers may also benefit from this study.