Comparative Move Analysis of Chinese and English Product Description on eBay

Abstract

Based on the move analysis theory of the ESP school, this research selects 10 product description pages of both Chinese and American e-stores on the international e-commerce platform eBay as the corpus of this paper. Quantitative analysis is used to compare the distinctive move structures of the product description in Chinese and American e-stores in order to find out the similarities and differences of moves employed between different countries and try to give explanations for the reasons behind these differences from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The results of this paper can be regarded as a valuable resource for those online shoppers from both China and America so that they can have a better idea to edit the product detail page and it is hoped that this paper could also provide some inspiration on the ESP teaching.