| Abstract is a very important type of writing, and almost all the academic papers or articles have an abstract in the front matter. A well-prepared abstract increases the chance of the paper to be accepted by reviewers and editors, or even to be published. A good abstract also arouses the readers' interest in the full paper. The abstracts written by some Chinese writers, even some advanced EFL learners, are far from being satisfactory. The present study aims to find out the differences of abstracts written by English native speaker writers and Chinese writers, and gives some suggestions on the pedagogy of abstract writing in EFL teaching. The literature was reviewed from the overview of abstract drafting to the thematic progression, and then to the investigation of lexical richness. The analysis followed the same line of theories. Altogether 200 abstract samples were collected, and divided into two groups according to different groups of writers; and two data groups CWD and NSWD were founded. The data were processed by computer software such as SPSS, Frequency and Range etc. Twenty sample abstracts were taken out from each data group, and were carefully read and analyzed to see how they were structured and developed. It was found that the abstracts written by Chinese writers were generally much longer than those written by their counterparts; and the two groups of writers had different focuses in writing the abstracts. Besides, the English native writers applied more thematic progressions to their writing. The abstracts from both sources also had different lexical richness: the TTR of NSWD was much higher than that of CWD, the Chinese writers used more low frequency words, and the two sample groups showed similar lexical density. Therefore, the Chinese writers should improve their basic knowledge and master some skills of writing an English abstract, and pay good attention to the structure, idea development and word choice. |
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