A Corpus-based Genre Analysis Of Thesis Abstracts Written By Chinese Postgraduates

As a microcosm of the research project, abstract is a bridge to communicate the essential elements of the paper. With the internationalization of scientific research, many Chinese scholars or students can share their research findings with others in the same field in the world by publishing paper. And abstract is the most simple and convenient way to present the research. So it is very important and meaningful for a non-English major postgraduate to write a high quality English abstract. As a textual pattern, abstracts represent a certain communicative purposes and obtain a kind of schematic structures. Therefore, research on abstract writing has aroused great interest among scholars. More and more abstract research has been done in recent years, but there has been little investigation on thesis abstract across three disciplines.A genre analysis on thesis abstract written by Chinese postgraduate in three disciplines---Education in Arts, Physics in Science and Municipal Engineering in Engineering are conducted following ESP genre analysis in this paper. In order to investigate the macro structure and micro linguistic features of thesis English abstract, the author carried out qualitative and quantitative studies based on a self-built corpus. The corpus we used consists of90thesis abstracts from articles in Wanfang data published in2009. The author randomly selected30abstracts in each discipline. The analysis of data was carried out on IMRD model proposed by Bhatia (1993) and GB7713-87, Presentation of scientific and technical reports, dissertations and scientific papers, proposed by National Documentation Standardization Technical Committees in China. IMRD model means that an abstract should contain4moves, such as Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion.The main results from the study are:1) Most of abstract are two or three moves pattern in the corpus and only14abstracts out of90meet the IMRD model. Introduction and Method move are attached much importance by the writers in three disciplines, because these two moves occur with high frequency. Meanwhile, the authors tend to omit the Discussion move. As for the Results move, most of writers in Science and Engineering field do a good job, while this move occurs with a low frequency in Education abstracts. And the writers in Education field tend to dislike listing the detail findings they got in the research.2) From GB7713-87, we can find that Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion are necessary in an abstract, and Result move and Discussion move are the most important one. It can be seen from this that most of the abstract in the corpus should be improved according to structural view.3) Examination on linguistic features shows that:as for the tense, the findings didn’t meet the Cooley and Lewkowics’s arguments well. Besides three most prevalent tenses, the simple present, the simple past and present perfect appear in the abstracts, the simple future, the past perfect and present continuous tense are also used in abstracts; as far as the voice is concerned, active voice appears with high frequency in three disciplines. Only several of students use passive voice in Method and Results move. This conforms to the previous study result; so far as personal pronoun is concerned, the first personal pronoun occurs with a high frequency, but with the plural form in Science and Engineering abstracts. While the third person singular occurs with high frequency in Art abstracts. According to GB6447-86(rules for abstracts and abstracting), the third personal pronoun should be used in abstract to stress the objectivity of the research. Thus it can be seen that some shortcomings exist in writing abstracts in terms of linguistic features. The author hopes that the findings may attract the students’attention.The present researching findings indicate that whether in terms of macro-structure or micro-linguistic features, a lot of deficiencies exist in English abstracts written by Chinese non-English major postgraduates. No thesis writing course is set up in most universities that may be the main reason why postgraduates don’t know the specific requirements when they write the English abstracts. As for the students, this study may attract their attention to the standard model established by English academic community, and help them produce effective abstracts writing to increase the publication. The deficiency of the study is the small data and limited majors. The study is the only one step to the top of the field research; it needs to be studied more and more by others.