A Corpus-based Genre Analysis Of English Abstracts Of Research Articles

Abstracts serve as a passport for research articles to go abroad.The particular genre of the abstract of research articles has received much attention.However,up to now,there are few studies to analyze the mistakes of the abstracts written by students in the way of genre analysis.This study attempts to make a genre analysis of students' abstracts by comparing with foreign scholars' with the help of self-built corpora aiming at further improvement of students' writing ability and the betterment of the EAP teaching.In this thesis,two corpora are established consisting of 100 abstracts written by students and 20 published abstracts produced by foreign scholars respectively.And Swale's Move-Step analysis model was adopted to analyze the generic structures of the abstracts.In this contrastive genre analysis,the pattern proposed by Ken Hyland(2000)IMPRC (Introduction Method Purpose Result Conclusion)was used,to which the move of lead-in and the move of summary are added according to the characteristics of students' abstracts.The quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted with the tool of Wordsmith and Window Excel.The results indicate that 1)students tend to start their abstracts with a redundant move of lead-in,with an occurrence frequency of 70%;2)the move of method and purpose in students' abstracts receive less attention than that in scholars' and are always mixed with other moves;3)students' abstracts are featured by the move of summary,which falls into two categories.One is the cumbersome summary of the result of the study using ordinal numbers, and the other is the presentation of the content of the study or what the writer has done;4)the move of conclusion is almost obligatory for students but optional in foreign scholars' abstracts.As regards to the general structure of abstract,students seem to go to great lengths to assure at least three moves to occur in abstracts while foreign scholars tend to adopt simple move structures to accomplish their communicative purpose.The study provides help for non-English major students to write effective abstracts and throws light on the betterment of EAP teaching.