A Contrastive Analysis Of Engagement Resources Between Soft Disciplines And Hard Disciplines RAAs

An academic genre, serve as a time-saver and index research engine, pecause it is the threshold to a full article, affording to readers the main content and nformation. Readers’ further reading depends to a great extent on a successful construction of an abstract. Such a dramatically important role does an abstract play in an article that research article writers have to put arduous efforts in examining its micro-linguistic devices.Although it is widely held that the specific disciplinarity of a particular discipline nfluences greatly its community members’ choices of linguistic devices when they construct research article abstracts (RAAs) for the acceptance from their own community, the studies on the engagement resources of RAAs of different disciplines are still few and far between. On the basis of Martin’s appraisal theory, the present hesis is to reveal the similarities and dissimilarities of engagement resources between nard disciplines (HDs) and soft disciplines (SDs) in research article abstracts, setting practices for novice writers when they write an abstract appropriate to a particular disciplinary community. Based on the self-established corpus of 40 RAAs,20 RAAs drawn from Economics (Ec) and Engineering (En) respectively, a profound contrastive analysis of the use of engagement resources has been conducted by exploring how writers of Ec and En exploit these resources to achieve their same communicative purpose in each move of this genre. Starting with the genre analysis of abstracts in this corpus with a purpose to reveal which rhetorical structure they follow, he IMRD model or the CARS model, it turns out that the discrepancy in use of engagement resources are attributed to disciplinary variation and different communicative purposes that writers intend to achieve in each move.The main findings of the present thesis have both theoretical and pedagogical mplications. Theoretically, the combination of two theories, Swales’ genre analysis at macro-level and Martin’s engagement resources at micro-level, will definitely strengthen the links between them, enriching each other’s theoretical framework. Pedagogically, the present study provides insights into English teaching and learning. Teachers can teach students how to produce a successful RAA by helping them acquire these conventional writing patterns, improving the odds of RAs publication.