English Abstracts Of Research Articlfs In English For Specific Purpose

Genre and genre analysis have become a hot topic in the field of language research, and the study in research articles(RAs) has long been a focal point. Abstract is to signify the epitome of RA, which deserves our close attention nation and abroad.The pertinent literature indicates that the studies in this area principally focus on the section like Introduction, Literature Review, or Discussion of a Master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. However, less attention has been paid to how it works in the abstract of RAs within a journal, i.e. English for Specific Purposes in this study.Based on the Swales’(1990) IMRD model as an investigative tool, this study primarily adopts genre analysis for 80 RA abstracts selected randomly, which aims to uncover and establish the specific generic structure of RA abstracts in the journal.The results show that the generic structure of RA abstracts comprises such five rhetorical moves as Situating the background(B), Introducing the research(I), Describing the methods(M), Summarizing the results(R), and Discussing the results(D), BIMRD for short, which generally conforms to the Swales’ IMRD model with B being an emergent move. Salient among my findings is that other predominant organizational patterns emerge, specifically BIMR, BIRD, and B[IM]RD.As for the linguistic features, much work has focused on tense, voice and first person pronouns. Drawing on the Hyland’s(2002) categorization, this study examines the reporting verbs to identify their categories and the functions. The analysis shows that in the corpus there are three types such as research verbs, cognition verbs and discourse verbs, and the most prevalent type is discourse verbs like indicate or reveal.It is sincerely hoped that the current study can enrich the genre analysis theory, expand the research spectrum, and proffer a new research prism. Meanwhile, it endeavours to contribute to some constructive pedagogical implications for ESP teaching and academic writing, help the students develop a good awareness of genre and guide them to write the abstracts and research articles more appropriately.