Corpus-Driven Analysis of Lexical Features in Journal Abstracts of Native and Non-Native Writers

This study aims to find out distinctive lexical features of article abstracts in two applied linguistic journals: PEE (Primary English Education) and TESOL Quarterly. For the purpose, 349 abstracts from PEE and 256 abstracts from TESOL Quarterly published from the year 2004 to 2015 were collected. By using WordSmith Tools Version 6, two corpora were analyzed in terms of frequency, wordlists, keyword lists, key clusters, and research-related words. The findings are as follows: First, native speakers used more words in a single sentence, and their abstracts showed a greater lexical variety than non-native speakers. Second, natives speakers and non-native speakers used function words in similar ways with reference to frequency. However, native speakers used some function words more frequently. Third, the PEE abstracts overused or underused several words due to their specialization in the field of primary English teaching. Fourth, with reference to the use of key clusters in the PEE abstracts, the majority were related to introducing the purpose of the study and reporting the study results. Finally, simple active forms were more frequently used in writing article abstracts and a set of collocations including sentence patterns were also used repetitively by native and non-native scholars in the field of applied linguistics. The results of this study may be used in developing a template for writing abstracts.