A Comparative Genre Analysis of English Argumentative Essays by English Majors and Non-English Majors

The paper reports on a comparative genre analysis of English argumentative essays by English majors and non-English majors.The study aims to identify the move-step structure and linguistic features of argumentative essays by the two groups of students, and finds out the similarities and differences in these two aspects.Of two sets of corpus built, each consists of 100 argumentative essays written by English majors and non-English majors respectively.Hyland's (1990) model is adopted as analytical framework to analyze the essays.The results show that the majority of students follow the three stages of the selected model.The findings also reveal that differences still exist between the two corpora in terms of the amount of the used moves, and the new move only occurs in non-English majors' corpus.