A Comparison of Moves in Abstract Sections of Applied Linguistics Research Articles By Non-Native Speakers

Research Article is one of the most important genres that received extensive attention in genre analysis. Research abstracts have received extreme importance due to the valuable academic information in the world. The present study aims to explore the rhetorical structure of the Iranian and international abstracts published in leading English and Persian journals. The researcher randomly selected 40 research articles from six Iranian journals of applied linguistics and international journals of applied linguistics. The study used two types of instruments. The Ant Mover software is a freeware text structure analysis program (developed by Anthony Laurence, 2003). According to Hyland’s model, five moves are involved, including Introduction (M1) purposes (M2) Method (M3) product (M4) and conclusion (M5). The corpus, then, was analyzed based on the Ant Mover software and Hyland’s (2000) five move frameworks to identify the rhetorical structure of the selected corpus. As a result, the frequency of each move in each abstract was calculated after the moves were analyzed. A frequency and percentage were counted and a chi-square analysis was run to answer the research hypothesis. The finding also showed that despite the differences in frequency of moves in two corpora, these differences were not statistically significant.

کلیدواژه ها:

genre ، writing ، research article ، abstract sections