Comparing Promotional Steps In English Abstracts In Chinese And International Academic Journals

As the essence of the full article and the first impression of editorial review,the abstract plays an important role in attracting editors' attention and is quite crucial for readers to decide whether they should carry on reading or not.Previous studies on abstracts mainly focused on rhetorical moves structure,with little attention paid to potential promotional functions and genre features of steps in a move which contribute to fulfilling different communicative purposes.Besides,in terms of linguistic realizations of abstracts,most studies were concerned with the native writer's preference as a norm,shedding not much light on the investigation of the cross-cultural features involving Chinese academic writers.Therefore,in order to explore the cross-cultural features between Chinese and international journal writers,the present study investigated the promotional steps and 3-word promotional lexical bundles occurred in different moves of the English abstracts published by Chinese and international journals.To achieve this purpose,two self-built corpora,NRAC(Native RA abstracts corpus,containing 647 abstracts)and CRAC(Chinese RA abstracts corpus,containing 604 abstracts)were employed and data extracted accordingly.Results show that,in terms of the promotional steps,compared with Chinese journal authors,international counterparts prefer not only the “dual-function” steps in the STR move,but also “dialogic” steps such as “Counterclaims” and “Support of hypothesis” in DTR move in order to highlight the novelty of the research and enhance the interaction between potential readers.The overall distribution of the promotional steps they used is relatively balanced.By contrast,Chinese writers tend to use more “Boosts of writer's own contribution” steps in the STF move in order to emphasize the importance of their research findings.It seems that Chinese and international writers promote their research in different ways.In addition,with regard to the 3-word promotional lexical bundles,these two corpora bear major differences in terms of frequency,types and promotional force.The types of promotional lexical bundles used by international journal authors are much more varied than those of Chinese journal authors in steps of “Claims of centrality”,“Statements of knowledge gaps”,“Boosts of the writers' own contribution”.As for the promotional force of lexical bundles used in both corpora,international journal authors use more assertive and argumentative lexical bundles in steps of “Statements of knowledge gaps” and “Boosts of the writers' own contribution”.The differences may further indicate varying orientations and preferences in boosting academic contributions between Chinese and international writers.It is hoped that the present study could help Chinese EFL scholars to realize there are cross-cultural differences in promotional rhetorical choices between Chinese and western academic communities.The findings of this research may provide some pedagogical implications for academic writing instruction.