THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALAY AND CHINESE POSTGRADUATES’ GRATITUDE: THE GENERIC STRUCTURE OF DISSERTATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Abstract

Acknowledgement is a genre that is widely used in academic discourse to express gratitude towards help from and contribution of an individual or an institution, thus establishing a favorable academic and social reputation. This comparative study is conducted to examine the generic structure of acknowledgement and linguistics elements written by Malay and Chinese Post Graduates in M. Ed. TESL program. The data were randomly collected from 40 post-graduate corpora from 2 Universities which are Universiti Teknologi MARA and Universiti Malaya and were purposively selected from 20 Malays and 20 Chinese post-graduate students’ theses acknowledgements of the universities. There are five research questions for this study (1) Do Malaysian Post-Graduate students’ ways of writing acknowledgement follow Hyland’s (2004) Generic Structure of Acknowledgement?, (2) What are the differences between Malay and Chinese post-graduate students’ structure of writing acknowledgement?, (3) What are the obligatory move(s) in Malay and Chinese structure of acknowledgement?,(4) What are the optional move(s) in Malay and Chinese structure of acknowledgement?and (5) What are the linguistic elements in the thanking act. Results reveal that the most prevalent items of Malay and Chinese way of writing acknowledgement derive from Thanking Moves namely thanking for academic assistance and thanking for moral support. This study also discovers that Chinese students tend to be more reserved compared to Malay by referring to high occurrence of bare mention in their sentence structure. Malay students tend to be more expressive in conveying their gratitude.