English Abstracts In Ma Theses By Native And Chinese Writers: A Genre Analysis

The abstract is crucial in thesis and dissertation writing, offering the writer anopportunity to state their new findings and helping the reader decide whether to readthe rest of the article. Based on Santos’(1996) BIMRD model, the present study aimsto investigate the cross-cultural variations between the abstracts in the field oflinguistics written by Chinese postgraduate students and their counterparts inAmerican and Canadian universities by analyzing eighty samples randomly selectedfrom PQDD (ProQuest Digital Dissertaions) and CNKI (China National KnowledgeInfrastructure).The results show that the Chinese abstracts in this field largely follow theinternational conventions based on the norms established by the English-speakinginternational academic community, as they present the four basic structural units(Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion) which constitute the different sectionsof the underlying research article. However, significant differences were also foundbetween the two groups of samples. The Chinese writers write much longer abstractswith more sentences. Move1(Situating the research background) and Move5(Discussing the results) are less frequently in the CWC than in the NWC.As for the linguistic features, the simple present tense is the most preferredtense choice, followed by the simple past and the present perfect; the active voice isused more frequently than the passive voice by both writers. While some nativewriters used first person singular pronoun I, Chinese writers used much more personalpronouns, especially first person plural we. While this study is expected to contributeto cross-cultural studies on academic English written by Chinese and native Englishwriters, pedagogically, it also aims to help Chinese ESP teachers and students tobetter deal with the English-language abstracts, the crucial part of their thesis ordissertation.