Comparative Analysis Of Moves And Lexical Bundle Characteristics In English Abstracts By Chinese And Native Writers

Academic abstracts have been generally recognized as an essential part in academic discourse because it opens a window for the content and structure of the whole academic article.A number of studies have investigated the rhetorical structure and linguistic realizations of published journal articles and students' writing.However,among the research into students' writing,little attention has been attached to master's theses abstracts.Lexical bundles are pervasive in academic language use and a key component of fluent linguistic production.Research into the correlation of lexical bundles and rhetorical moves conduces to better understanding of the structure and function of texts in the writing of master's theses abstracts.Extending previous studies,the present study focuses on the move structure of master's thesis abstracts and the characteristics of lexical bundles in each move.The following three questions are addressed to guide the study:1.What are the features of the move structure of abstracts by the two groups? Is there any similarity or difference between the two groups?2.What are the structural features of the target lexical bundles in each move? Is there any similarity or difference between the two groups?3.What are the functional features of the target lexical bundles in each move? Is there any similarity or difference between the two groups?This study reports the comparative analysis of move structure and the structure and function of four-word bundles in master's thesis abstracts from applied linguistics written by Chinese students and English native students.Two corpora of 60 master's thesis abstracts accomplished between 2010 and 2015 were randomly selected from the CNKI database and the Proquest database.Santos'(1996)five-move model was adopted for the analysis of move structure and Antconc 3.4.4 was used to search the target lexical bundles,which were then analyzed using Biber et al.'s(1999)structural taxonomy and Hyland's(2008b)functional classification.This study yielded the following findings.Firstly,analysis of move structure revealed a significant difference in the use of move by two groups.It was found that Move 1 occurred in 98% of the abstracts written by Chinese writers but only in 67%of the abstracts by English native students.This indicates that Chinese writers tend to provide abundant background information to acquaint readers with the research field,while native student writers tend to come straight to the topic to be discussed.The analysis also showed that both groups did not use Move 5 so often,revealing that both groups tend to lack the awareness or ability of offering explanations for the results of their study.Secondly,structural analysis of the target bundles revealed that both groups relied heavily on prepositional phrase bundles and noun phrase bundles with different emphasis when constructing their writing.They rarely used verb phrase bundles.Thirdly,related functional analysis showed that both groups used research-oriented bundles more frequently than text-oriented bundles and seldom used participant-oriented bundles.This study has important pedagogical implications.Through this study,teachers can better understand the move structure and use of lexical bundles in students' abstract writing and thus guiding students to enhance the awareness of writing a normative academic abstract and incorporate it into practical teaching activities,enabling students to write a well-structured academic abstracts with appropriate coverage.In other words,in the teaching of academic writing courses,teachers should not only pay attention to the coherence and fluency of linguistic expressions,they should also instill genre knowledge of different writing sections(e.g.,Abstract,Introduction,etc),to ensure students' writings are rich in content and logical in form.