A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis On The Genre Of English Abstracts In China’s Agricultural Journals And SCI International Journals

Genre analysis on academic writing has drawn unprecedented attention in recent two decades concerning the field of discourse analysis. Literature review indicates that contrastive studies on abstracts in agricultural RAs are comparatively limited. Sample analysis shows that English abstracts in Chinese agricultural core journals are different in structure from those in SCI international journals. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a study on the generic structure of English abstracts in Chinese agriculture journals and those in SCI journals.Based on self-built corpus. this study conducts a contrastive analysis of English abstracts of RAs from the field of animal science in Chinese agricultural core journals and those in SCI international journals for the purpose of revealing the generic structure of agriculture RA English abstracts and the factors accounting for the differences.Sixty English abstracts are extracted respectively from RAs of five Chinese agricultural core journals and five SCI international journals, from issues in2012to establish a small-scale corpus with two sub-corpora. Swales’(1990) move-step analysis model is used in analyzing the macro-structure of abstracts and micro-structure of moves. Introduction-Purpose-Method-Result-Conclusion (IPMRC) model is employed in the annotation of moves and steps. AntConc and Excel are employed in searching and data analysis.Results show that:In terms of the discourse structure,60%abstracts from SCI international journals are consistent with five-move structure, and38%are four-move structure. As to the move order,(I)PMRC is the dominant structure in both corpora, but abstracts from domestic core journals, either four-move or five-move structure, show diversity in move order. As to the micro-structure of moves, abstracts in both corpora have similar occurrence frequency in stepl, but there are differences in step2and step3.Structural differences in the two corpora can be attributed to the fact that domestic genre analysis on academic writing started later than international study and the analytical model is comparatively less advanced which lead to the lack of criteria and instructions in academic teaching and writing. The findings of this study are components of agricultural academic writing researches; the corpus can be used as samples for the teaching of RA writing. In addition, this study is considered as a pilot study for the construction of large-scale agricultural English Corpus.