A Study Of Discourse Features Of English Abstracts In Research Papers

In almost all the academic environments, undergraduate and postgraduate students are asked to write research papers. The abstract as a condensed representation of the contents of the research paper is an indispensable part, which summarizes the main contents of the paper and serves as a useful tool in searching for information. However, English abstract writing is a complex and not an easy task, especially for the Chinese students. Although the particular genre of abstracts has attracted researchers'attention, few of them explored the discourse features of the abstracts written by the postgraduates. The present study aims to investigate the macro generic structures and micro linguistic features of the English abstracts written by the postgraduates majoring in English and find out the problems existing in their writing. It is expected that the investigation can help Chinese students and other research paper writers improve their awareness of the discourse features of English abstract and its writing.In this thesis, Swales'Move-Step (Swales,1990) model is used to analyze the macro structures of 50 English abstracts which are chosen from Taiyuan University of Technology. They constitute a corpus in this study. All these English abstracts are written by the postgraduate students of applied linguistics. Besides the macro perspective, the micro linguistic features, including the use of tenses, voices, modal verbs and transitivity are also examined in the thesis.The results of the study indicate that all the selected abstracts follow the sequence of IMRD pattern (Introduction-Methods-Results–Discussion), but only 24% of theses abstracts are made up of four moves. The abstracts written by the postgraduates in Taiyuan University of Technology are incomplete. The phenomenon of missing move is relatively severe. Except for the Introduction move, the other three moves are more or less neglected, especially the Discussion move. It is also found that some students mistook the abstracts as the introduction of the paper. The micro study of linguistic features of thesis abstracts suggests that under the influence of communicative purposes the simple present is the most frequently used tense. With regard to other linguistic features, students tend to use the active voice, the low degree of certainty modal verbs and relational process of transitivity to organize their papers.Unquestionably, because of the limited time and energy, there are some limitations in this research, for instance, the quantity of the corpus, the identification of the moves. It is hoped that this study can benefit the teachers who teach English writing to promote the teaching development and help students have a better understanding of academic writing and write more well-organized research paper abstracts.