A Comparative Study of the Rhetorical Moves and Communicative Functions of Journal and Thesis Abstracts

The abstract found at the beginning of most journal articles and theses has increasingly become an essential part of academic writing and acquiring the skills of writing an abstract is therefore important to L2 novice writers to enter the discourse community of their discipline. Based on 50 professional writers’ abstracts from five international journals in applied linguistics and 50 Korean students’ abstracts from their Master’s theses in the same discipline, the present study attempts to explore similarities and differences in the rhetorical moves of abstracts as well as major communicative functions and dominant linguistic features realized in each rhetorical move between two corpora. The results showed that although there was no statistically significant difference between expert writers and student writers in the frequency and distribution of moves, the use of certain communicative functions and linguistic features realized in each move distinguished professional writers from student writers. The Korean students’ thesis abstracts contained certain functional and linguistic inadequacies which may hamper the general readability and acceptability for the scientific community. Implications of the findings for the teaching of academic writing for NNS students are presented.