Genre Analysis of TEFL Thesis English Abstracts and Their Persian Translations

This research aimed to investigate English and Persian abstracts of TEFL theses. To achieve the study s objective, 120 English thesis abstracts and their Persian translations of Iranian TEFL students at the MA level at different universities in Iran were collected and then analyzed. The sampling method used was purposive sampling. First, two raters qualitative content analysis was done based on Swales’ (2004) model. Then, the frequencies and percentages of different moves were calculated in the English and Persian corpora. Finally, Chi-square tests were run to check the significance of the difference between the frequencies of different English and Persian corpora moves. The results showed the occurrence of various moves in the English corpus. The results also confirmed that other moves were present in the Persian corpus. Finally, the results demonstrated that there was a significant difference between the frequencies of different moves in the two corpora, except Move 1 Step 2 Making topic generalizations, Move 2 Step 1B indicating gap, Move 2 Step 1C Question raising, and Move 3 step 6 (PISF) Stating the value of the present research.