Cultural Variations across Academic Genres : A Generic Analysis of Intertextuality in Master ’ s Theses Introductions

Genre analysis of texts has always been significant. The current study aimed at investigating intertextuality considering cultural variations and differences in students’ discourse communities. Social studies, philosophy, and biology were chosen as the representatives of social sciences, humanities and sciences. Tehran University, one of the most prominent and oldest universities in Iran, was chosen as the source of the theses. From each discipline, eight theses were chosen randomly and the organization of the introductions was analyzed according to Samraj’s revised model of Swales (2008). Next, a comparativeand contrastive analysis was performed between the results obtained from this study and the ones obtained from Samraj’s (2008). The results indicated that social studies and biology introductions were quite similar and followed the traditional format of thesis writing whereas philosophy introductions were different as they had a more topic-based structure.


Genre and Genre Analysisin Brief
The word Genre means a particular type of art, writing, music etc., which has certain features that all examples of this type share (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2008).The term has a wide usage in rhetoric, media, theory, and even education (especially linguistics) to refer to a special kind of text.According to Connor (1996), genres are not static, homogenous texts but truly dynamic and vibrant.Based on what Bakhtin (1986) proposed, texts have ordered and unified forms (as we can see that stories have structures); they are also "intertextual", which means texts need other sources to rely on.Therefore, intertextuality, which is shaping the meaning of a text by referring to other texts, plays a key role in completing the meaning of a text and resulting the meaning of the context.
The definitions of the concepts of "genre" in genre analysis (Swales, 1990) and "culture" in intercultural contrastive rhetoric (Connor, 1996) have evolved since they were first presented.
According to Bhatia (1993, cited in Tench, 2003), genre analysis is the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings which has four main features: 1) Genre analysis shows a genuine interest in the use of language to achieve communicative goals.Therefore, it is not an extension of linguistic formalism.
2) Genre analysis does not represent a static description of language use but gives a dynamic explanation of the way expert users of language manipulate generic conventions to achieve a variety of complex goals.In fact, it combines the advantages of sociolinguistics perspective with those of cognitive perspective.
3) It is primarily motivated by applied linguistics concerns, especially language teaching at different levels.
4) It is narrow in focus but wide in vision, which allows it to focus on specific differentiation in language use at various levels of generality.
According to Bhatia (2002), genre analysis is a means to understanding the realities of the world of the texts and as he states, the world we experience is both complex and dynamic.Its complexity is due to the existence of various textsof different types and these texts often serve overlapping and conflicting communicative aims.He noted that genre analysis has three prominent frameworks: 1) Corpus Studies -the computational analysis of language 2) Textual Analysis -linguistic descriptions of texts 3) Critical and ethnographic analysis -interviews and case studies Paltridge (2001) argues that genres need to be considered not as patterns of texts in isolation but in relation to the context of production and interpretation and to the aims and assumptions of particular discourse communities.
According to Berkenkotter andHuckin (1995, cited in Bhatia 2002), genre knowledge is a form of situated cognition and it is inseparable from writer's socialand procedural knowledge.Therefore it is essential for the learners to acquire genre knowledge, procedural knowledge, and social knowledge in order to become better writers.Thus, the significance of genre analysis becomes obvious as it is necessary in analyzing the texts (specially formal and academic ones), and for finding remedies to overcome structural weaknesses in writing.

Swales CARS Model and Its 2008 Version
CARS means Create a Research Space (Swales, 1990).According to one research conducted by Swales years before putting his model forward, he found that most of the theses he examined contained four rhetorical moves which enable a scientist create a research space in his work.
Swales ' (1990) Create a Research Space model has been deeply influencing in analyzing research and academic texts.The model that Swales offered in 1990 is in fact a revised version of his own model which was offered in 1981.In the 1990 version of the CARS Model, Swales accentuated some aspects of the model such as ecological analogy that is a part of community psychology.Community psychology is the study of the individuals' contexts within communities and the wider society and the relationships of the individual to communities and society.Swales (1990) argues that ecological analogy captures a number of characteristics of the research article introductions: the need to re-establish in the eyes of the discourse community the significance of the research field itself: the need to "situate" the actual research in terms of that significance; and the need to show how this niche in the wider ecosystem will be occupied and defended.It follows that the amount of rhetorical work needed to create such a space depends on the existing ecological competition, on the size and importance of the niche established, and on various other factors such as the writer's reputation.The next move begins with indicating a gap/ question in the research, followed by indicating a problem in real world.These two steps describe the inadequacies of the previous researches, the question that is not answered in previous researches, or a problem that exists in the world and has not been discussed.The last step is positive justification which she had included it in the previous model.It serves as a part which shows the positive aspects of the current study.
The third move begins with stating the goals/ argument of thesis.The authors statetheir aim in conducting the research.Next step is called "background".Regarding the definition of background, Samraj (2008) states that, in some cases, the hypotheses being tested by the study are only listed after this site/species (background) description.This step then enables a further specification of the goals of the study reported.It should be noted that this background discussion is analyzed as part of the introduction rather than a separate literature review because this discussion ends with a return to a crucial step of the third move, namely, stating the goals of the study in more specific terms.Samraj (2008) also adds that "Often, after a statement of the purpose or goals of the thesis, there is a long exposition on the species or site that is the focus of the study.In these discussions the student writers appear to be displaying their knowledge of the field through numerous references to the literature.Components of the epistemic world such as the researcher and research procedures (MacDonald, 1994) are not foregrounded as sentence subjects in these descriptions.Rather, the actual phenomenon being studied is the focus of the discussion".The next step is presenting the hypotheses, as exists in her previous model, followed by the presentation of the results which announces the principle outcomes of the thesis.The last step to be mentioned is previewing the organization of ideas (previously called "outlining the structure of the paper") in which the author explains what other chapters are going to talk about.These steps form the theoretical structure of a thesis; however, writers may not include some parts in their thesis writing.A summary of this model is as follows: The research questions to be answered regarding this article are: 1) Are there any differences among Iranian students from various fields of study regarding their theses overall organizations?
2) Do Iranian master students and their American counterparts (from the research conducted by Samraj, 2008) differ from one another in applying patterns to their introductions?

Materials
The data of this study comprised a corpus of twenty four randomly selected master's theses produced at Tehran University in Iran between the years 2001 and 2011, and every eight theses were selected from a different field of study including philosophy, biology and social studies.The theses were chosen as examples of the science (Biology), social sciences (Social Studies), and humanities (Philosophy) and the aim was to compare the results obtained from this study with the results provided by Samraj (2008) as both of the studies investigated the same discourse communities.The selection of the theses was quite random.The number of theses chosen from each year is summarized in the table below: The rationale behind choosing Tehran University among many other options available to the researcher was that it is the oldest and one of the best universities in Iran and compared to other universities in Iran.Regarding the world ranking, this university was a good choice to be compared with one of the largest state universities in America, from which Samraj (2008) had obtained her data.In her study, Samraj (2008) did not mention a special year in choosing her corpus, so the factor of time was not significant in this comparative study; however, the current of study is limited to the years 2001 to 2011in order to have a recent data.

Procedure
The following procedures were used to answer the research questions of this study: 1) The theses introductions were analyzed in terms of structure, using Samraj's revised model of Swales' CARS model (2008).
2) Iranian Graduate Students' Theses Introductions were compared with each other to find out the similarities and differences among them as they belonged to various discourse communities and disciplines.
3) Finally the results obtained from this study were compared with the results provided by Samraj (2008) to find out the similarities and differences between Iran Graduate Students and their English counterparts.

The Analysis of the Introduction Structure
Analyzing the introduction can be shown as what follows: Move 1 1) The claim centrality was investigated based on the two aspects of importance in the world and importance in research.
2) The literature review from previous researches or topic generalizations were checked to be presented.

Move 2
3) The body of the texts was scrutinized to check the existence of a gap or question in research.
4) Just like the above step, the indication of a problem in the real world was checked out.

Move 3
6) The introductions were investigated to see if there were any statements of the goals or arguments.
7) The background, which according to Samraj (2008) is a step that enables a further specification of the goals of the study reported, was checked.
8) The availability of the hypotheses in the body of the introductions was checked.
9) The texts were investigated to see if the author presented the results of the research or not.
10) Finally the organization of ideas preview, where the researcher mentions what he is going to do in the following chapters, was checked out.

Overall Organization
The macro structure of the biology and social studies generally follows the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) structure of a research article (Swales, 1990, cited in Samraj 2008).Philosophy theses introductions were different from the introductions of biology and social studies as the biology and social studies introductions had the classical format of theses writing but the macro structure of philosophy theses was somewhat different.The theses began with the introduction which gave information on the problem and described the philosophical issue related to the real world, resulting in a structure that is called "topic-based research" by Paltridge (2002, cited in Samraj 2008).All of the philosophy theses had the introduction section before chapter one which was called the general section.The first chapter was dedicated to the definitions and the general points related to the research.There were no sections titled as "literature reviews" in the structure of the philosophy theses but the next three chapters described different parts of the issue and served as "sub-topics".The final chapter was about the conclusion and final comments of the writer.
In biology theses, the macro structure of the theses was traditional which means they had an introduction, the review of the literature (except two of them that had a descriptive section related to the entity being tested), methodology, data analysis and results, and finally discussions, conclusions and implications (one thesis did not contain any implications and recommendations for further researches).
The social studies these were more akin to the biology and biotechnology theses.However, they had some sections and each section had several chapters.The sections were like the chapters in biology and biotechnology theses.One of the theses had the conclusion in the final chapter of the last section.Two of the theses did not have any implications and suggestions for further researches.

Philosophy Introductions
Two of the introductions contained claim centrality and mentioned the importance of the topic in the real world but not in research: 2. The two materials and non-material substance will be discussed thoroughly in the following chapters.

Biology Introductions
Regarding the claim centrality, three of the theses mentioned the importance of the subject in the real world: 2. In the following chapters, We will present the current situation, and then we will investigate the reasons of cosmetic surgery and the truth of the hypothesis.

Discussion and Conclusion
The results are summarized in the table below.Three moves were analyzed in the research: Table 2. Summary of the data obtained from Introduction Analysis According to the analysis of the introductions and also based on the results, it became evident that the humanities students (at least the participants in this research) preferred to dedicate their introduction to introduce the issue and discuss the problems related to the main topic and investigate its different aspects.They applied fewer citations but discussed their own points of view.However, science students were the ones who based their introduction writings on a more traditional basis which is called the traditional format (Dudley-Evans, 1999, cited in Samraj, 2008).Whenever they needed to give reference to previous studies, researches, and theories, they had a citation to show that their own research is based on a logical framework.According to Hyland (2000, cited in Samraj (2008), published texts are the most concrete realization of the social practices of academic writing.Samraj (2008) stated that the master's theses are not homogenous as the students belong to various academic disciplines.The representatives of social sciences and science (social studies and biology) were more similar to each other as they both followed a more IMRD or traditional structure and the representative of humanities (philosophy) was different as it followed a more topic-based organization.
Also the Iranian students and their American counterparts had the same patterns applied to their theses introductions as in both cases, the representatives of humanities applied a topic-based organization whereas the other two groups tended to follow a more traditional pattern.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The 2008 version of Swales' CARS model

Table 1 .
The frequency of the chose theses from the corpus The aim of this research is to understand the meaning of God and soul which Spinoza means.None of the theses included any backgrounds, hypotheses, and results, Two of the theses contained thesis organization preview: ‫اهﻤﻴﺖ‬ ‫ﭘﺮ‬ ‫ﺑﺴﻴﺎر‬ ‫ﭘﮋوهﺸﯽ‬ ‫ﺣﻴﺚ‬ ‫از‬ ‫ﮐﻪ‬ ‫ﺷﻮد‬ ‫ﺑﺮﻧﺞ‬ ‫ﺟﻨﺲ‬ ‫ﮐﻴﻔﯽ‬ 2. Studying and researching this method can result in an increase in the quality of the rice and is of great importance in terms of research.