The differences between malay and chinese postgraduates' gratitude : the generic structure of dissertation acknowledgement

Acknowledgement is a genre that is widely used in academic discourse to express gratitude
towards help from and contribution of an individual or an institution, thus establishing a favorable
academic and social reputation. This comparative study is conducted to examine the generic
structure of acknowledgement and linguistics elements written by Malay and Chinese Post
Graduates in M. Ed. TESL program. The data were randomly collected from 40 post-graduate
corpora from 2 Universities which are Universiti Teknologi MARA and Universiti Malaya and
were purposively selected from 20 Malays and 20 Chinese post-graduate students’ theses
acknowledgements of the universities. There are five research questions for this study (1) Do
Malaysian Post-Graduate students’ ways of writing acknowledgement follow Hyland’s (2004)
Generic Structure of Acknowledgement?, (2) What are the differences between Malay and Chinese
post-graduate students’ structure of writing acknowledgement?, (3) What are the obligatory
move(s) in Malay and Chinese structure of acknowledgement?,(4) What are the optional move(s)
in Malay and Chinese structure of acknowledgement?and (5) What are the linguistic elements in
the thanking act. Results reveal that the most prevalent items of Malay and Chinese way of writing
acknowledgement derive from Thanking Moves namely thanking for academic assistance and
thanking for moral support. This study also discovers that Chinese students tend to be more
reserved compared to Malay by referring to high occurrence of bare mention in their sentence
structure. Malay students tend to be more expressive in conveying their gratitude.