| In the past two decades, applied linguists and language teachers, especially those in the field of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purpose), have shown a great deal of interest in a genre-based approach to the analysis of written and spoken discourse in academic and professional settings. This approach is defined as ESP genre analysis (Hyon, 1996), which allows a far thicker description of functional varieties of written and spoken language than that offered by any other system of analysis (Bhatia, 1993). ESP genre analysis contributes to a better understanding of what actually constitutes the structures and linguistic features of a certain genre such as research articles (RAs) and to a clearer idea about the effects of other factors such as writers' language-using environment on these features. Researchers using ESP genre analysis have conducted studies on different generic sections of RAs, for example, the Introduction and Discussion sections, but there have been very limited genre-based studies on abstracts, especially abstracts attached to medical research articles (MRAs), a very important and widely used form of communication in the area of medicine. To our knowledge, no contrastive ESP genre analysis was reported in the comparison of English medical abstracts written by Chinese and those by non-Chinese writers. The present study was designed to apply ESP genre analysis to analyzing the structures, that is, moves and steps, and some linguistic features, namely, the hedging devices, verb voices, tenses and the first personal pronouns in the English abstracts of MRAs and to compare the abstracts to find out whether there were any differences between the English medical abstracts written by Chinese and non-Chinese academic writers.In our study, a pretest was first conducted, aiming to attest whether ourplanned analysis approach was applicable and whether the research itself was operational. Following the pretest, two corpora of medical abstracts, to be used as the database for this study, were established. One was made up of 40 English medical abstracts written by Chinese writers, which were randomly selected from ten core and source periodicals and journals in China and the other consisted of 40 English medical abstracts randomly obtained from PubMed, an on-line database established by the National Center of Biology Information (NCBI) affiliated to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the United States. Employing the 5-step procedures suggested by Nwogu (1997) and our modified 5-move pattern of IAMRC (Introduction - Aim -Methods - Results - Conclusion), which was based on the four-move pattern of IMRD (Introduction - Methods - Results - Discussion) proposed by Bruce (1983), we first identified the moves, semantic units of a text to achieve a unified purpose in ESP genre analysis, in the English medical abstracts under study. Then using the Move-Step model suggested by Swales (1990), we analyzed both the macro-structure and micro-structure of the English medical abstracts in the two corpora, in term of moves and steps, respectively. The internal structures of each move, which was composed of either one step or a combination of steps, were analyzed. As for the linguistic features, the frequencies of some linguistic forms, namely, hedging, verb voices, tenses and the first personal pronouns were counted manually and the results were calculated. Chi-Square Test and Fisher Exact Test were used in analyzing the results of the comparison between the English medical abstracts in the two corpora for any difference in the structures and the linguistic features.The main results from our study were: 1) 79 out of the 80 English medical abstracts under study had distinctive Aim, Methods, Results and Conclusion moves and 15 out of the 80 medical abstracts had Introduction moves. 2) Move 4 (Results) was the longest section of the English medical abstracts in the two corpora. 3) The English medical abstracts written by Chinese writerswere significantly shorter than thos...
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