Two-Layer Contrastive Genre Analysis Of EST Abstracts

Due to the particular role abstracts play in research article reading and publication, it is essential for Chinese graduates to understand and master the genre knowledge of abstracts of English for Science and Technology. But heretofore there has been little empirical work done in analyzing the genre of research article abstracts, still less to the comparison of research articles across disciplines and cultures.In this paper, we conduct a two-layer contrastive study on abstracts of English for Science and Technology(EST). Random sampling was adopted and six self-built corpora were built, and totally 180 abstracts written by Chinese student writers and native speaker writers across three disciplines were obtained. The schematic moves and lexical chunks of these abstracts were identified and compared regarding disciplines and cultures.The study comes up with fruitful results in exploring a relatively ignored genre and thus greatly enriches the English for Specific Purpose (ESP) genre analysis and corpus research. The evidence shows that disciplinary variation is one parameter that affects the abstracting. Disciplinary variation does make a difference to the holistic features of abstracts, move frequency, numbers of abstracts having different number of moves, move length. Nevertheless, as for the move sequence, we find abstracts of three disciplines share the regularity of a linear sequence despite the a few cases of cycle, reversion and repetition. Our analysis also shows that disciplinary variation also imposes an effect on the choice of chunks assigned in different moves. Inadequate awareness of genre knowledge and disciplinary variability is found in Chinese students' writing. A transfer of the textual and rhetorical strategies of Chinese language may, to some degree, account for such divergence of writing between Chinese students and native speaker writers.The study provides help for Chinese graduates or academics majoring in these disciplines to read and write research article abstracts in their own fields more...