A Genre Analysis of Biography Texts on the IMDB Website

Abstract

Genre analysis is among the core areas of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and has been gradually gaining importance because it offers clear, to-the-point and fruitful implications in the field of ESP. The radical increase in the digitalisation helped genre studies be more specific and accurate. The participation of users to the Web as the content writers maximised the specificity of genres and online communities started to form their own sub-genres. Biography texts represent an excellent example of this. This study aims to make a genre analysis of the biography texts on the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) website which were created by the members of an online community. The texts were chosen from the biographies of the last 20 Oscar-Winning actors and actresses, and a corpus was compiled. Casañ-Pitarch’s (2017) Analysis of Multi-Genre Structures (AMS) model was adopted to analyse the texts. According to the analysis results, a genre-based instruction as a part of an English for General Academic Purposes course was proposed. © 2019, Universitat Jaume I. All rights reserved.