The book review genre: A structural move analysis

The current study aimed at showing whether native, ESL and EFL book review authors differed in terms of types of rhetorical moves the employ in the reviews they write. 60 book reviews (N = 60) from applied linguistics journals were randomly selected from a pool of 87 book reviews published in Asian EFL Journal, ESP, System, and TESOL Quarterly between 2004 and 2010. The reviews were converted into *txt files and submitted to the AntMover software for move analysis. Two human coders used the Motta Roth’s (1995) framework for the analysis of the moves. The intercoder reliability of the study was estimated through a Spearman’s rho at .819 (rho = .819), and the convergent validity of the instruments by another Spearman’s rho at .782 (rho = .782). The data were submitted to a set of Kruskal-Wallis H Test. The results of the study indicated that writers’ linguistic backgrounds have a statistically significant role in their choice of book review moves and move structures. It was also found that book reviews fall into the two categories of ‘informative’ and ‘evaluative’ reviews with the difference between the two lying in the presence or absence of writers’ focused evaluation of the books under review in terms of their advantages and/or disadvantages.