A Contrastive Study Of Ra Abstracts In English And Chinese: From Genre Perspectives

As a special academic genre, abstracts of research articles (RAs) are not only aformal requirement by many publications, but also a functional tool of informationretrieval. However, some Chinese scholars appear to write them by imitation and knowlittle about their generic structures and functions. There are few generic studiesconducted on Chinese RA abstracts and their comparisons with the RA abstractswritten in English. Thus in the present thesis,30Chinese and30English RA abstractsof published articles on education were randomly selected as two sets of corpora andanalyzed in the Swalesian way. By careful examination of both the move structuresand the linguistic features of the data collected, it aims to obtain a comprehensiveunderstanding of the similarities and disparities of RA abstracts between English andChinese. Results show that both languages have different types of abstracts fordifferent purposes, but the indicative abstracts of the CARS model seem to dominatethe Chinese RA abstracts on education. Microscopically, though both English andChinese RA abstracts tend to use more the simple present tense, the active voice andhedges, they have different distributions in different moves due to their differentlinguistic and cultural features. In conclusion, the Swalesian tradition on genreanalysis is effective and the combination of the two methods of macro and micro canreveal more. It is suggested that more contrastive studies across cultures based onlarger corpus are still needed to inform the practice of second language teaching,especially writing and translation.