Genre Analysis of Subheadings in Chinese MA Thesis Introductions

YINGHUI SUN

Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100897

Subheadings of research paper, that is, headings used for section divisions, are regarded as “first impressions of a research work” (Busch-Lauer 2000: 77) as any other kinds of headings. Being a genre with its own features, subheadings are playing very important roles in the construction of both the structure and the content of any research paper. First of all, they are aimed to achieve the communicative purpose of attracting the reader; in addition to that, by employing its specific patterns, subheadings are informative enough to convey to the reader what the section is about. At the same time, studies have shown that the generic pattern of subheadings should also match the macro-structure of the specific text.

1. Research background and research questions

Most research papers contain a certain number of sections, which are usually marked by subheadings, that is, headings used for section divisions. By giving readers a clear indication of what the specific section of the article is about, subheading is an important rhetorical device for making the research paper informative as well as attractive at the first sight. As a genre with its own features, subheadings of the academic paper play very important roles in both the construction and the communication of the paper.

Recent years have seen research paper headings or subheadings being studied from various aspects. For instance, Haggan (2004) tried to reveal some functions of headings in the text, and Busch-Lauer (2000: 77) identified three basic functions: normative function by identifying a piece of work; designating function by designating the contents of a piece of work, and advertising function by appealing to the reader.

Some researchers tried to reveal the language features of headings. Soler (2007, 2011) found that the structural construction of headings showed different features in different genres. Haggan (2004) and Soler (2007) also found peculiarities present in articles of different scientific disciplines. Through a corpus-based study of medical research article titles, Wang and Bai (2007) analyzed the syntactic structures of the titles and concluded that nominal groups in a variety of forms are most frequently used.

Special attention has also been given to different types of subheadings and their actual use in research papers. In a corpus study of 350 journal articles covering the period from the year of 1944 to 1989, Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) noticed two phenomena about the use of subheadings in these data. First, there has been a steady increase in the number of subheadings used. In 1944 there were about 1.3 subheadings per article, whereas in 1989 it increased to about 3. Second, a dramatic increase since the 1970s in the use of informative subheadings has been found, from 6% in 1974 to 38% in 1989. Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995: 36) used the term “informative subheading” to refer to the subheadings with specific content.

In their study, some lexical and grammatical changes were also revealed in the way subheadings were composed. According to their study, more and more informative subheadings were being presented as full sentences rather than as commonly used noun phrases. The reason for the genre conventions used in scientific journals being undergone gradual changes, as Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995: 42) explained, is due to the fact that readers now have been under increasing pressure from the fast speed of information accumulation, and they have to access and read the journal articles in a quick and selective manner. Therefore, the change of the genre conventions for the writing of headings and subheadings is just for accommodating this reading purpose.

Subheadings are particularly prominent in much longer research papers such as graduation theses or dissertations. Bunton (2002), in his study on the genetic moves in Ph. D. thesis introductions, found two overall focuses indicated by subheadings: introducing the field and introducing the present study. The purpose is obvious, that is, to make the most relevant information about the research prominent. Bunton (2002: 64) distinguished three types of subheadings. One is “topic-specific”, which is related to some aspects of the research topic; another is “generic heading”, which could be used in an introduction to any topic, and the third is in the case of being “partially generic”, that is, the combination of the above two. From the point of view of information carried in the subheadings, the first type and the third type belong to informative subheadings, as Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) termed, and the second type belongs to non-informative subheading.

Different from studies mentioned above, Yang and Allison (2004), while carrying out an analysis of research paper macro-structures, found that the subheadings also serve as an important indication to the generic pattern of the paper.

All in all, subheadings are the important component in research papers, especially in long research papers such as theses and dissertations. Aiming to achieve some specific functions, the genre of subheadings has its own generic structures as well as its language features. In addition to drawing attention of the reader by using appealing forms, such as bold type, they can achieve the purpose of being informative and communicative through various language forms. The main types of subheadings are generic, content-specific and the combination of both. At the same time, while trying to make the long text more explicit in structure, subheadings should match the macro-structure of the specific text. These findings contribute greatly to our understanding of the generic feature of research paper subheading as well as the nature of research paper itself.

Although functions of subheadings and how they are presented have been noticed by some researchers, studies on this topic are relatively few. In addition, these studies focused mainly on research paper titles and these papers are mainly published in journals, with the writers being mainly experienced experts in the research field. Bunton’s study (2002) involved subheadings of Ph.D dissertations in Hongkong, but these student writers were completing their dissertations in an English-speaking environment. Little research is done on the genre features of subheadings used by mainland Chinese students writing research paper in English. This study therefore aims to investigate how the mainland Chinese students use subheadings in their most important academic writing—MA theses. The specific questions addressed are:

(1) What types of subheadings do Chinese MA students choose? What are the features of these subheading types?

(2) What is the generic pattern of subheadings in Chinese MA theses? What are their functions? Does the generic pattern match the macro-structure of the Introduction part of the research paper?

This study is significant in that by carrying out a systematic study of the subheadings used by Chinese MA students, this research will help to enlarge our understanding of the generic feature of this special type of genre. As a proper heading prevents a paper from being discarded and ensures that it addresses the right audience, heading writing, as Soler (2007: 90) said, is “a challenging exercise that demands the use of various skills”. Therefore, this study will contribute to the guidance of novice writers to form the headings appropriately.

2. The corpus and analytical framework

The corpus chosen for this study is Chinese MA theses. As an MA thesis is a very long text, and in order to ensure an effective and thorough analysis, this study mainly focuses on the introduction part. To avoid some possible discipline differences, the data were confined in the area of Applied Linguistics. To ensure the study is based on a corpus large enough, the corpus for the study consisted of 100 introductions taken from MA theses completed in the recent years in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. The corpus of these 100 Chinese MA thesis introductions consisted of 451 pages of text, 1103 paragraphs, 10200 lines, and about 122400 words, with an average of 4.5 pages, 11 paragraphs, 102 lines, and 1224 words respectively, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Basic facts of the corpus

Another reason for choosing the introduction part for study is that this part of research paper is a much researched section, especially in the field of genre studies, and some generic structures of the introduction have been researched by scholars such as Nwogu (1991, 1997), Bunton (2002) and Swales (1981, 1990), among which Swales’ 3-move structure, the CARS model, is the most influential (Swales 1990: 141), as can be seen in Table 2.

Table 2 Swales’ CARS model for research article introductions

As we can see from the name of the model as well as the terms used to describe the moves and steps, Swales used an ecological analogy to show the generic pattern of research article introductions. According to this model, RA introductions often begin with a move that establishes the general topic being discussed, followed by the writer’s effort to create a niche for himself/herself within this territory in a number of ways. Finally, the writer occupies the niche from different perspectives. This move-step analysis provides an effective framework for carrying out a genre analysis, and at the same time, it also indicates the macro-structure of research article introductions. In the present study, Swales’ CARS model serves as the referent to see whether the generic pattern of subheadings used in Chinese MA students’ theses is in agreement with this macro-structure.

In the process of analysis, subheadings of each text were noted down. Following Bunton’s (2002) division, types of subheadings used by Chinese MA students were categorized. Features of these subheadings were also identified according to Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (1995) distinction of information load. Frequencies and distribution tendencies of these subheadings were calculated and specified based on which the generic pattern of the subheadings used was established.

3. The findings

Findings of the subheadings used in the Chinese MA thesis introductions are presented in the following order. First, the overall fact of the subheadings is shown so that we can have a general picture of them. Then, types of subheading are categorized according to the language features, based on which, the information load the subheadings carry are presented. Following that, the generic pattern of the subheadings is identified according to the real use of the subheadings and their number of occurrence. Finally, functions of the subheadings in the introductions are explored.

(1) Overall fact of subheadings used in the corpus

It is found that dividing the introduction into a certain number of smaller sections is a common practice in Chinese MA theses. Ninety texts among the 100 theses under study contain subheadings, with one ten texts (10%) having no section divisions and thus no subheadings used.

For some theses, the introduction part contains more than one level of subheadings, with the next level being the further division of the previous level. The purpose is obvious, that is, to give more detailed illustration of the points concerned in the same section. Two levels of subheadings were used, the first-level subheading and the second-level subheading, as shown in one text below.

1.ThestudyofCRs

1.1Originofthestudy

1.2DifferenttermsusedinCRstudy

2.Coherencerelationsdefined

2.1Clauseasthebasicstudyingunit

2.2ThedefinitionofCRs

3.Thesignificanceofthepresentstudy

3.1TheimportanceofCRstudy

3.2Theneedsforfurtherdevelopment

3.3Studiestobedoneinthepresentstudy

As is shown in this example, this introduction part contains three first-level subheadings numbering 1, 2 and 3. Under each subheading, there are two or three further divisions, numbering 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2 and so on.

Among the 100 MA thesis introductions, 278 first-level subheadings were used, with the average number for each text being 3.1. Seventeen of them have second-level headings, and therefore, the total number of subheadings is up to 339 with the average number for each text being raised to 3.8. The basic facts of the subheadings are indicated in Table 3.

Table 3 Basic facts of the subheadings

This use of subheadings is not surprising, given that an MA thesis is a relatively long paper and usually involves a number of themes or perspectives at one paper, which may naturally lead to further divisions for presenting these different ideas.

(2) Types of subheadings

All the three types of subheadings distinguished by Bunton (2002)—topic specific, generic and partially generic—have been found in the 100 Chinese MA thesis introductions. Examples are as follows:

Topic-specific:Cohesionasthesubjectofstudy

Whatishumor?

Generic heading:Theresearchtopic

Significanceofthestudy

Partially generic:Previousstudiesonauthenticity

Contrastivestudyofcolorword

In the 278 first-level subheadings, the number of each of the three types is not evenly employed by Chinese MA students, as is shown in Table 4.

Table 4 Number of different type of subheadings used

We can see that among the 278 first-level subheadings, the overwhelming majority (239) is in the form of generic headings, occupying 86% of the total. Topic specific headings and partially generic ones are not very much used, occupying only 8% and 6% respectively.

(3) Informative and non-informative features

Just as the two terms suggest, informative subheadings refer to those titles which convey more explicit information. Among the three types of subheadings distinguished by Bunton (2002), topic specific, generic and partially generic, two types can be grouped into “informative” category, that is, the subheadings of “topic specific” and “partially generic”, and the “generic” type belong to non-informative. From Table 4, we can see that 86% of the first-level subheadings are non-informative and 14% of them belong to informative ones. Interestingly, there are more informative subheadings in the second-level headings. Within the traditional generic sections labeled asresearchtopic,mythology,researchobjectivesand so on, some student writers tend to use informative second-level subheadings to foreground some specific and important topics, procedures, research aims and so on. The number of the informative and non-informative (generic) of the two levels of subheadings is shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Number of informative and non-informative subheadings used

We can see that if we take account of both the first-level and second-level subheadings used in the Chinese MA theses (altogether there are 339 subheadings), there is a big increase in the number of informative subheadings (from 14% to 29%), though the generic subheadings are still the majority.

(4) Generic pattern of the subheadings

Most subheadings in the 100 introductions under study followed an explicit conventional structure, first introducingthebackgroundoftheresearchortherationaleforthestudy; then indicatingtheresearchtopic, reviewingpreviousstudiesonthetopic, pointing outtheresearchobjectivesorraisingresearchquestions, with some making cleartheresearchmethodologyand (or)thewayhowdatacollected. Many texts include the section headingthesignificanceofthepresentresearch, and most texts contain the part oforganizationofthethesis, with some containing a specific section fordefinitionoftheterms. The subheadings used with their number of occurrences are shown in Table 6.

Table 6 Subheadings used in the corpus and their frequency of occurrence

Since the generic subheading is the main stream and therefore more representative, this type of subheadings is put in the column of the “main subheadings” here. The other two types of subheadings, the topic-specific and partially generic ones, are left to the column of “other terms”. The subheadings listed in the table are sequenced approximately in the order they appeared in the text.

As we can see from the table, these subheadings have their specific focuses, from the explanation of “why this research”, such as introducing the background, the rationale, and the significance of the study, to “what the research about”, such as the introduction of the research topic, of what has been done in previous study, and of the research objectives or the specific research questions, and finally to “how to do the research”, such as indicating the research methodology, the way the data collected and the layout of the thesis structure.

As is also shown in Table 6, the occurrence number of the subheadings is at great variance. Most introductions (77 texts, 86%) in 90 texts have a specific section for the organization of the thesis, which means that the majority of Chinese MA students realized the necessity of clear indication of the thesis structure, so that the readers can follow the whole thesis easily.

The subheadings of “Background of the research” and “significance of the study” also have very frequent occurrence in the MA students’ introductions. We can see that 37 MA theses started from the account of research background before introducing the research topic. Thirty-five introductions contained “The significance of the study”, which usually came after the announcement of the present research, with the aim of indicating the importance of the study, thus providing the value or contribution to the area under investigation. Twenty-seven introductions in the corpus did not use “background of the research” as the starting subheading; instead, the students use “the rationale for the study” to explain the reason for the research before coming to the topic itself, which plays a similar role with the research background.

About a third of the total introductions set a specific section for “the research topic” and a small proportion of theses (18 texts among 90 texts) contain explanations of the important “terms” or “concepts” involved in the research topic. A few texts use subheadings for clear indication of research objectives (15 texts), research questions (5 texts), research method and data collection (5 texts).

As we can see from the occurrence number, each of the subheadings listed in the table were not evenly distributed in the corpus. Three groups of them can be roughly classified according to their frequency of occurrence: the most frequently used, the least used and some heading used with the number of occurrence in between. The most frequently used group includes only one subheading with a frequency of appearance of over 70%, the “organization of the thesis”. Four subheadings were found to be present in around 30% of the corpus, and they are “background of the research” and/or “rationale for the study”, “the research topic” and “significance of the study”. The least used group includes the last five subheadings listed in Table 6 appearing in less than 20% of the texts.

We take the subheadings that occurred with about 30% of regularity and above in the corpus as stable ones. Therefore, five subheadings in the first two groups constitute the generic structure of subheadings in Chinese MA thesis introductions, as is shown in Table 7, and this five-subheading constitute the generic pattern of the subheadings used in Chinese MA thesis introductions.

Table 7 Generic pattern of subheadings

(5) Functions of the subheadings

If we compare this generic pattern of subheadings in Table 7 with macro-structure exhibited through the moves and steps in Swales’ CARS model (See Table 2), we can see that they do not match either in the number of the component or in the way each component is expressed. However, if we examine the functions of the subheadings in the pattern, we can see that the generic pattern shares a great deal with the macro-structure of Swales’ CARS model.

According to their communicative purposes, these five elements in the generic structure in Table 7 can be classified into three functions. The first two subheadings, “background of the research” and “the rationale for the study”, give an account of the reason or necessity for the research, aiming to answer the question of “why this research”; the third and the fourth subheading, “the research topic” and “significance of the study”, explain the content of the research and the importance of doing it, answering the question of “what the research about”; and the last subheading aims to show “how the research is carried out”. These three aspects constitute the three main functions of the subheadings used in Chinese MA students’ thesis introductions, as is shown in Table 8.

The first move in Swales’ CARS model,EstablishingaTerritory, by presenting the topic under study and its importance, explains what the research is about; the second move,EstablishingaNiche, gives reasons for the necessity of carrying out the research, which matches “why this research” in the macro-structure. The third move,OccupyingtheNiche, just intends to answer the question of how to do the research. Therefore, we can draw the conclusion that the generic pattern identified in the Chinese MA students’ thesis introductions matches the macro-structure of this specific section of the research paper.

4. Conclusions

The present study is a genre analysis of the subheadings used in Chinese MA thesis introductions. It is revealed that Chinese students use subheadings extensively in their MA thesis introductions, showing that these student witers have realized the importance of the rhetorical device in making the long introduction more explicit and more appealing to the reader.

It is true that there are no unified subheadings in research articles (Yang & Allison 2004) as well as in theses or dissertations (Bunton, 2002). It is the same case for the subheadings used in Chinese MA thesis introductions. Some subheadings are more conventional, following the order of ‘Researchbackground’, ‘Researchtopic’, ‘Significanceoftheresearch’, and ‘Organizationofthethesis’. Some are more varied either in the order sequence or in the way the subheadings are expressed. This feature, just as Yang and Allison (2004) said, reflects the fact that each text has its individual organizational characteristics. However, in spite of the existing differences, these texts also exhibits some common features both in the way the subheadings are expressed and in their order sequence, based on which the generic pattern of the subheadings was identified. The generic pattern of subheadings used in the Chinese MA thesis introductions is composed of five main subheadings—backgroundoftheresearch, (or)therationaleforthestudy,theresearchtopic,significanceofthestudy,andorganizationofthethesis.

The generic pattern of the subheadings chosen by Chinese MA students focuses on the three wh-questions from a functional perspective, “why this research”, “what the research about”, and “how to do the research”. These three functions match the macro-structure of the text indicated by Swales’ CARS model. This finding confirms what Yang and Allison (2004) has stated that the subheadings also serve as an important indication of the macro-structure of the text. This result shows that the Chinese students select their subheadings carefully and could achieve the overall communicative purpose of the specific section.

However, as for the subheading types used by the Chinese MA students, most students prefer the generic one, and the use of informative subheadings is at a small number, which shows that only a small group of student writers possess the awareness of making the reading informative enough through their choice of subheadings, while most students did not attach much importance to the informative feature of the subheadings.

Subheadings of research papers are indispensable part of most research papers. Being written in short form and in most cases, printed in bold types, subheadings can easily draw the attention of the reader, thus a well-written subheading helps foreground what it aims to achieve. This study also has great significance in helping the students to form their subheadings appropriately.

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