Justification Resources in English Thesis Abstracts Written by Chinese and Malay Doctoral Students

Justification resources are crucial dialogic resources for writers to express their intersubjective positionings and negotiate writer-reader relations. Thesis abstracts play an essential role in the construction and dissemination of new knowledge. Little attention, however, has been paid to the use of justification resources in thesis abstracts. Therefore, this corpus-based research aims to examine the use of such resources in English thesis abstracts from a cross-cultural lens. Based on a corpus of 124 English thesis abstracts by Chinese and Malay doctoral students in the discipline of linguistics, this research investigates if the use of justification resources differs between Chinese and Malay doctoral students in their English thesis abstracts. Quantitative analysis showed that although the normalized frequency of justification markers in Chinese students' thesis abstracts was higher than that in their Malay counterparts' texts, Mann-Whitney U test showed no significant cross-cultural difference. In-depth textual analyses found that Chinese students used more informal, and had a wider range of, justification markers than Malay students, but these two groups of students deployed three identical methods to justify the authorial stances. These results revealed that Chinese students' English thesis abstracts are more dialogized, contractive and informal in comparison with their Malay counterparts' texts which are less dialogized and contractive but more formal. Findings of this research have some pedagogical implications for the teaching of non-native learners' academic English writing.