Genre Analysis Of Research Article Abstracts By Native And Nonnative Speakers Of English

In the past twenty years, genre and genre analysis have attracted linguists'attention, who have studied different kinds of discourses by adopting genre analysis. As an academic genre, the research article (RA) abstracts play an important role in academic community. They serve as a time-saving device by informing the readers of the main content of the article, indicating whether the full text deserves their attention.This paper aims to explore the differences between RA abstracts by native and nonnative speakers of English in terms of the structure and linguistic features. To carry out the research, the author establishes two corpora NSC (native speaker corpus of English abstracts) and NNSC (nonnative speaker corpus of English abstracts) consisting of twenty English abstracts. The former takes abstracts from several prestigious international journals, such as Lingua, Language & Communication, Cognitive Science, and English for Specific Purposes. The latter takes abstracts from some famous Chinese journals, such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Journal of Foreign Languages, and Foreign Language Education, etc. Theoretically, the commonly accepted IMRD model (Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion) and Swale's Move-Step model are adopted to analyze the macro- and micro-structure respectively.It is found that the Introduction Move is obligatory for English RA abstracts by nonnative speakers as opposed to the Introduction and the Results move by native speakers. Linguistically, this paper investigates hedging, tense, voice, and first person pronoun used in English abstracts. It is seen clearly that native speakers tend to express possibility while nonnative speakers are likely to express certainty rather than fuzziness. In addition, hedging devices are in general not used in the Method Move and the Discussion Move. There are three most commonly used verb tenses: the simple present, the present perfect, the simple past tense. As for the voice, it has been found that both native and nonnative speakers use active voice more frequently than passive voice. The current research has shown that the first person plural pronouns are used more frequently than first person singular pronouns.