Review of Literature

Acknowledgments are short pieces of writing through which the writer seeks to explicitly negotiate interpersonal relationships and reflect socio-cultural interactions that have received little attention in the literature, most significantly those written in Persian. The importance of this section actually derives from their high frequency of appearing in books, articles, and most notably MA and PhD dissertations. This section demarcates a combination of institutional, academic, financial, technical, interpersonal, and moral support to the person or institutions for their contributions (Mohammadi, 2013). Thus, Al-Ali (2004) comes to the stage and argues, as PhD students are prospective members of the academic community, they are expected to demonstrate awareness not only of reciprocal gift giving rules that they should apply in areas of civilized life but also of central values and rules as well as the community oriented ethos that should apply in this regulated activity of academic practice (p.36).

Acknowledgments are, as Brodkey (1987) states, formal properties of scholarly texts and are part of the cultural repertoire of all academics. The history of this section, which sometimes appear in the preface

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and sometimes appear as an isolated section itself, according to Giannoni (2002), goes back to when the writers were dependent on the powerful ones in authority so as to publish their academic works. Bazerman (1984), in his experimental reports in physics notes that acknowledgements date back to 1890s; they were personal testimonials to friends and mentors while those that re-emerged in the 1920s were more spare, sharing limited forms of credit, and recognizing institutional dependencies. Nonetheless, he further argues that acknowledgments did not explicitly emerge until 1940 and were not a regular feature of Physical review articles until 1960.

As cited in Al-Ali (2010), for Swales & Feak (1994:203) the acknowledgment section is not only a display of gratitude for assistance, but also an opportunity for acknowledgers to show that they are members of the academic community and have benefited from that membership. Hyland (2000) points out that by acknowledging the debt of precedent, a writer is able to show the fidelity to a particular community and establish a credible writer ethos. Moreover, Benn-Ari (1987) defines the acknowledgment as special contextual construct whose formation is governed by conventions which are different from those of the main text. Furthermore, he sees this section as

Formulations that take on an intermediate position between the internal contents of the ethnography and the people and relationships outside it: they are both an introduction to an intellectual product and a reconstruction of the external contributions that have gone towards its realization (p.65).

The literature on the acknowledgment section, as pointed out earlier, is very limited despite the fact that the section is a very common part of dissertations (i.e., 80% of MA theses and 98% of PhD dissertations in Hyland & Tse (2004). Unfortunately, very few studies have been conducted to examine acknowledgments written by MA and PhD students. The literature mainly comprises the studies done by Hyland (2003, 2004) and Hyland & Tse (2004), which aimed at exploring the structure of the acknowledgments and the pattern of thanking expressions appearing in acknowledgments based on a corpus of 240 MA theses and PhD dissertations written by non-native English speakers in six academic fields (i.e. Applied Linguistics, Biology, Business Studies, Computer Sciences, Electronic Engineering and Public Administration). Moreover, to the best of my knowledge, only Mohammadi, (2013) and Adbdollahian and Hashemi (2013) have examined acknowledgment section within an Iranian context, but none of them looked at this section cross-culturally across gender. So, further research need to be conducted to examine the impact of gender in the study of rhetorical moves in writing the acknowledgment section among Iranians and non- Iranians.

As quoted in Abdollahian and Hashemi, (2013), Hyland (2013) concentrates on the textualization of the gratitude suggesting that acknowledgments reflect authors' unique rhetorical choices which are shaped by the authors' social and cultural characteristics and by the field they get specialized in. Hyland (2004) generates a content-based framework for acknowledgments by introducing three separate moves: reflecting move, the section where the authors comment on their experiences; thanking move, the place presenting gratitude to academic assistance, family and friends; and announcing move, the final part including the acceptance of responsibilities for flaws or errors and dedication of the thesis. It is also worth mentioning that, in their work, Hyland (2004) made it crystal clear that one of the moves, the thanking one (move 2) is obligatory, whereas other moves, namely reflecting move (move 1), and announcing move (move 3), are optional. For them, in thanking move there are 4 sub-divided steps, namely presenting participants (Step 2.1), thanking for academic assistance (Step 2.2), thanking for resources (Step 2.3), and thanking for moral support (Step 2.4). Also, there are two sub-divided steps for the third move, namely accepting responsibility (Step 3.1) and dedicating the thesis (Step 3.2).

The above three studies (Hyland, 2003; 2004; Hyland & Tse 2004) set the scene and opened the window for subsequent research. Zhao & Jiang (2010) examined DA written by Chinese speakers in China using a

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corpus from English-related disciplines, and found that the structure generally follows Hyland's (2004) model. Nevertheless, subtle differences were seen. In their corpus, the first two moves are absent, specially Step 3.2, and the writers were prone to excessively use the bare mention form and modifiers in the thanking act. Within an Islamic context, Al-Ali (2010) works on a corpus of 100 acknowledgments written by Arabic native speakers in English within the framework of the move structure proposed by Hyland (2004), the Reflecting- Thanking- Announcing Move structure. He faces the "Thanking Allah" pattern in the Arabic PhD dissertations as one additional move. Examining the acknowledgments, he builds a new move structure (see Table 1) for the Arabic acknowledgments, observes the thanking strategies employed in the moves and makes a socio-cultural analysis of the PhD dissertation acknowledgments written by the native speakers of Arabic.

Table1. Number of Move components in Dissertations Acknowledgments written in Arabic Source: Al-Ali, 2010:8 Component Moves of Arabic acknowledgments n:100 Number of Moves

1.Opening 25

2.Praising and Thanking Allah (God) 70

3.Thanking Supervisors and other Academics 100

4.Acknowledging Access to Resources 62

5.Thanking for Moral Support 61

6.Invoking and Blessing 68

7.Closing 52

8.Signing off 20

Genre analysis has become a crucial approach to text analysis. According to Swales (1990), a genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience.

According to Bhatia (1993) cross-cultural variation in spoken interaction has become a well-established area of discourse study but very little has been published in the case of written genres, though recently there have been some indications of interest in cross-cultural variation in academic and professional discourse. It has been well known for some time that various cultures organize and develop ideas differently when writing expository texts and these differences persist when users of these languages and cultures learn to write in a new language. In a recent study, Hinds (1990: 98), investigating expository writing in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Thai, discovered that in all these languages there is a common style which is characterized by ‘delayed introduction of purpose’. This delayed introduction of purpose, he claims, has the undesirable effect of making the essay appear incoherent to the English-speaking

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reader, although the style does not have this effect on the native speaker. Others (Hinds, 1990; Clyne, 1981; Kaplan, 1983; Connor & McCagg, 1983; Cheng, 1985) have also come up with similar findings in the case of expository and argumentative prose. However, the situation is somewhat less than satisfactory in the area of professional and academic genres.

Research Questions

1. Is there any significant difference in frequency of Moves Iranian TEFL MA and PhD holders adopt in writing their dissertations acknowledgment across gender?

2. Is there any significant difference in frequency of Moves Iranian TEFL PhD and non-Iranian Applied Linguistics & TESL PhD holders adopt in writing their dissertations acknowledgement across gender?

Hypotheses

The above research questions will lead into the following null hypotheses:

1. There is no significant difference in frequency of Moves Iranian TEFL MA and PhD holders adopt in their dissertations acknowledgment across gender.

2. There is no significant difference in frequency of Moves Iranian TEFL PhD and non-Iranian Applied Linguistics & TESL PhD holders adopt in their dissertations acknowledgment across gender.

3. Methodology