A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF GENERIC ORGANIZATION OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS BY IRANIAN STUDENTS ACROSS HUMANITIES SUB-DISCIPLINES

Genre studies have attracted many researchers` attention. The present study was to observe the differences in generic structure of doctoral dissertation acknowledgement texts written by Persian native and English non-native (Iranian) PhD students. To this end one hundred (sixty in Persian and forty in English) dissertation acknowledgement texts were selected. Hyland`s (2004) model was utilized for the study.. After analyzing each text, the main moves and their steps were extracted and the frequencies of each one were calculated and compared. Also, a chi-square test was applied to check whether differences between Persian and English texts were meaningful. The results showed that there were some differences but these differences were not statistically significant .In addition, two new steps called “thanking God” and “opening” steps were discovered throughout this study. And the difference in using these steps between Iranian students writing in Persian and English was statistically significant.