English Abstracts Of Textile Research Articles: A Genre Analysis

In the last twenty years,ESP genre analysis has been employed successfully in investigating written and spoken discourse in academic and professional settings, arriving at significant structure-function correlations.Despite the great attention paid to almost all sections of the research article(RA),it seems that the RA abstract,as one of the most widely used research process genres,has also lately aroused more interest than any other genre.One of the focuses of abstract research is on the cross-disciplinary and/or cross-cultural variations between abstracts composed by authors from different research fields and with different cultural backgrounds.The present study attempts to contribute to the ongoing cross-cultural genre analysis of academic discourse by examining differences and similarities between the generic structures of three groups of English-language research article abstracts by scientists in the field of textile industry—non-Chinese contributors to international journals,Chinese contributors to international journals,and Chinese contributors to local Chinese Journals as well as the lexico-syntactic strategies used to realize their communicative purposes.Based on the well-known four-part pattern of the abstract genre—IMRD(Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion) proposed by Bruce and the Swales' Move-Step model,a total of 150 abstracts were examined for their generic structures and linguistic features regarding the use of modal verbs,verb voices,tenses and the first personal pronouns.Results show that,while the three groups of abstracts share important features,which make the documents a specific genre,some degree of divergence has been found between the groups.The abstracts composed by non-Chinese writers are more complicated in terms of generic structures than those written by Chinese writers and the abstracts from local Chinese journals are structurally simplest.Besides,linguistic features distribute differently in the four structural units to realize different communicative functions.The rhetorical variations in terms of the generic structures and the lexico-syntactic features are mainly explained by the different cultural backgrounds that the members of the international and Chinese scientific communities have.The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study in ESP and EAP research are also discussed.