Analyzing the Background and Problem Statement of Ph.D. Theses Written by Arabs in Selected Malaysian Universities

Abstract

The background and problem statement to the study is the first part of the research and so, gives the reader a first impression. The background should explain the meaning of the concepts/variables; pay particular attention to the dependent variable; state its importance; and then link or relate it to the independent variables with appropriate references; but proceeding from general to specifics, It is what gives the reader the impression that the researcher has a good understanding of the research topic; and of course, the subject matter. This study aims to perform a genre analysis on the apparent structural linguistics and grammatical patterns of 30 PhD theses’ introductions and problem statements written by Arabic scholars in English, focusing primarily on the language structure and macro-level move analysis of the selected theses. This study used an updated CARS framework (Swales, 1990) for the move analysis which comprises three primary moves as the theoretical frame. There are three stages to this study. Stage 1 entails the data collection which is important to gain entry to the particular settings in the articles. The 30 PhD theses were accessed from various university library databases; their copies were later compiled in computer-readable form. Stage 2 entails the corpus compilation stage where the theses were edited and saved as a raw corpus to manually tag the moves and search the structural linguistics prior to conducting the search process. The final stage entails the genre analysis which consists of the move analysis and structural analysis. The main findings revealed that the problem statements and introductions of the descriptive theses are made up of two mandatory moves (Move 1: Situating the Research and Move 2: Presenting the Research) and three elective moves. Meanwhile, the informative theses comprise three mandatory moves (Move 1: Situating the Research, Move 2: Presenting the Research, and Move 3: Describing the Problem) along with two elective moves. The findings revealed differences between the descriptive and informative theses, whereby more phrasal lexical bundles exist compared to clausal ones. This study hence suggests the development of a viable pedagogical template to be integrated into the syllabus, which would serve as a coping strategy for students in responding to the rigorous demands of academic writing.