A Genre Analysis Study on the Rhetorical Organization of English and Turkish PhD Theses in the Field of English Language Teaching

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of the introduction sections of 20 PhD theses in Turkish and in English in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). The main aim of the study is to explore whether the authors from different academic institutions within the same discourse community performed the same rhetorical strategies in the introduction parts of doctorate dissertations. The study proceeded on a qualitative research design, through a content analysis including both genre and discourse analysis, which was carried on the basis of CARS model 2004 version under the scope of Swalesian approach. In general, the findings on the employment frequencies of each rhetorical strategy show that, although the dissertations have been written by the authors within the same discourse community (the realm of ELT), and context -Turkish context-, English thesis introductions have a more complex rhetorical organization than the introductory parts of Turkish theses.