A Comparative Study On Moves Of English Abstracts In Educational Technology Journals

Research article abstract with specific communicative purposes and communicative objects is characterized by specific genre features.As a special genre,it highly condenses the main content of papers through which readers can quickly and effectively understand the research article.In the past few decades,the research article abstract has been focused on extensively.The studies of abstracts have been carried out in the field of Humanities and Social Science,Engineering and Technological Science,Medical Science,Agricultural and Nature Science.However,there is still a lack of study on abstracts in the field of Educational Technology.Based on the theory of genre analysis,the present study exploring the moves of research article abstracts in the field of Educational Technology in English journals and Chinese journals focuses on the following questions:(1)What's the typical move model of English abstracts in Chinese journals and in English journals?(2)How are the moves of ET English abstracts written by Chinese scholars different from or similar to those by international scholars at macro and micro level?In this study,in order to probe into the above questions,two corpora are established: the corpus of English abstracts in Chinese journals written by Chinese scholars and the corpus of English abstracts in English journals written by international scholars.Totally 360 abstracts are collected from six prestigious journals including three English journals(British Journal of Educational Technology,Journal of Educational Technology & Society,Computers & Education)and three Chinese journals(Modern Educational Technology,China Educational Technology,Technology Enhanced Foreign Language Education)from the year of 2014-2016.Based on Santos' five-move model,this study adopting the UAM Corpus Tool and AntConc for corpus annotation and analysis found that:(1)most abstracts in International Corpus follow logically a straight line of situating the research,presenting the research,describing the methodology,summarizing the results and discussing the research.And in Chinese Corpus abstracts follow the model of situating the research,presenting the research,and discussing the research.The five moves in English journals distribute evenly whose occurrence frequency are all higher than 70%.By contrast,three moves occur more frequently in Chinese Corpus and the frequency of results move is only 43.3%.(2)Among the three-word or four-word lexical bundles in abstracts,as well as,of this study,in this paper,the purpose of,the purpose of this,this study is,in order to,the results of,results suggest that,results show that,results showed that in International Corpus are generally used to activate Move 2 and Move 4.By contrast,lexical bundles used to trigger the moves are only in this paper,as well as,in order to in Chinese Corpus.Most of the lexical bundles in Chinese Corpus are obscure to activate particular communicative functions of moves.The present study suggests that in order to improve the quality of abstracts writing and display clearly the research results,Chinese scholars should improve the macro-structure and pay more attention to the lexico-grammatical characteristics to achieve the communicative purposes of each move.They should logically follow a straight line of situating the research,presenting the research,describing the methodology,summarizing the results and discussing the research and increase appropriately the proportion of methods and results to inform readers the main content of their researches as exhaustively as possible.Besides,teachers should help students to have a comprehensive understanding of strategies to achieve the communicative purposes in terms of discourse construction.It is useful to take the five moves of abstracts as the writing practice and encourage students to adopt certain lexical bundles to carry out the functions of each move and improve the linguistic fluency of their writing.As described above,the present study has achieved valuable research findings which have some enlightenment for future researches and academic writing.Due to limited human and material resources,however,this study focused only on the abstracts in the field of educational technology.Despite the social purposes of abstracts are essentially the same,abstracts of different types in different disciplines may have different stages of development and the move structures and move features of abstracts vary in different cultures and different languages.Therefore,more abstracts in different disciplines and different cultures need to be studied in the future research.