| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 100 === Although the acknowledgement section is not an obligatory component in a dissertation, it can offer authors a rhetorical space to convey their gratitude for the assistance in the process of writing a dissertation. Besides, it can help authors to promote a favorable social and scholarly character. Recently, a number of studies have examined the move (generic/ schematic) structure as well as linguistic features of dissertation acknowledgements in different disciplines and cultures. However, relatively few studies have investigated the move structure, particular expressions of gratitude and their collocations in English acknowledgements written by the native and non-native English speakers. This paper, therefore, can make a contribution to the field of EAP by investigating the acknowledgements accompanying 205 MA dissertations composed by Vietnamese and native English graduate students in the field of Applied Linguistics. With reference to the pioneering studies of Hyland (2004) and Hyland &; Tse (2004) on dissertation acknowledgements, this study aims to discover their generic structure via move analysis and lexico-syntactic expressions of gratitude to explore similarities and differences between the two groups. The findings reveal three outcomes. First, although the writers of both groups tend to follow Hyland’s (2004) framework in the move structure, the use of sub-moves varies considerably between the two groups with a predominant use of sub-move 2c – thanking for the resources – by the Vietnamese group. This could be a reflection of the real situation of research in Vietnam where researchers often lack resources. Second, while the Vietnamese authors use a very high frequency of nouns and adjectives to express gratitude, the native group favors verbs. Among the gratitude patterns proposed by Hyland and Tse (2004), the Vietnamese group employs a high percentage of nominalization, and adjective, whereas the native group prefers to use performative verbs and bare mention. Third, another interesting finding is that the Vietnamese authors attempt to employ a wider variety of modifiers in collocation with the expressions of gratitude than the native authors do. Vietnamese authors also show their special preference to some patterns, such as “I would like to express my deepest thanks/ gratitude” as a result of the direct translation from the Vietnamese language into English. The findings can have meaningful pedagogical implications and can contribute the field of genre analysis.
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