Genre Analysis Of English Abstracts Of Agricultural Science And Technology Papers

In recent years, more and more genre analyses have been carried out in academic disclosure studies in the field of applied linguistics. However, few studies have been applied on the genre analysis of research article(RA) abstracts in agriculture.The author built two corpora which is a random sample of fifty abstracts in agricultural RAs of Chinese writers from Chinese core journals and another fifty abstracts of native English writers were taken from SCI respectively. In this thesis, Swales’ s ESP genre analysis were adopted to analyze the macrco and micro generic structures of the one hundred English abstracts written by Chinese and native English-spoken scholars. Linguistic features were also examined, analyzing their similarities and differences and finding the reasons. The results indicated that the generic structures of native English speakers’ abstracts are basically accordance with IMRC model, while the Chinese scholars often omit some moves of the abstracts. When it comes to linguistic features, the hedge and the first person plural pronoun are more frequent used in the native English-spoken writers’ abstracts. Both Chinese and the native English-spoken scholars prefer the passive voice and simple present tense in abstract writing. The current research findings can make pedagogical implications of abstract writing for agricultural students. It is hoped that the results may also help more Chinese agricultural scholars grasp the particular academic genre structure and ultimately write more normative English paper abstracts.