Proper

Abstract

Genre analysis plays a particularly important role in English for Specific Purposes courses. It discovers the distinctive use of language and moves in target genre, and many ESP courses are currently adopting it for a research tool. It is also a representative learning activity and useful heuristic for producing the learned genre. However, some learners’ performance of genre analysis in several studies, in particular their performance of identifying move structure, was not satisfactory. Given the importance of moves, such unsatisfactory performance could undermine the efficacy of genre pedagogy. As noted by Swales (1981), move identification can be subjective, and it could be hard for some learners to determine move structure of a genre on the basis of the content and distinctive linguistic features. In this paper, the use of thematic analysis for identifying moves was examined. The results indicate learners can perform and exploit thematic analysis, and it can provide additional objective evidence for them to determine the move structure of genre.