The Rhetorical Moves And Language Errors Of Abstracts In Undergraduates’ Graduation Theses Written By English Majors In China

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, abstract has been the most simple and convenient way for researchers to present and share their research with the world. The universal version of abstract is in English. Henceforth for English majors, writing a qualified English abstract is very essential.As a specific textual pattern, abstracts obtain a certain kind of schematic structure. Therefore, research on abstracts has aroused great interest among scholars. More and more studies of abstract have been done in recent years, but there has no empirical study investigating the abstracts of undergraduates’ theses of English majors in China.In order to fill this gap, the present study randomly selected90linguistic-related abstracts of English undergraduates in Hainan University from2006to2008, and the author did qualitative and quantitative studies on this corpus. Study on the rhetorical moves took Santo’s (1996) five-move pattern as the theoretical basis, which is:STR-Situating the Research, PTR-Presenting the Research, DTM-Describing the Methodology, STF-Summarizing the Findings, and DTR-Discuss the Research, with the aim to examine the moves adopted in the abstracts of undergraduates’graduation theses of English majors. The language errors were classified into five types:Mechanical errors, Lexical errors, Syntactic errors, Discourse errors and Stylistic errors to analyze language errors existing in this corpus.The main results from the study structurally are:1) the patterns of rhetorical moves in present samples did not fully agree with the pattern of Santo’s (1996). Among the abstracts examined, the majority adopted two-move or three-move pattern. And only11.11%abstracts completely conform to Santo’s five-move pattern2) the occurrence frequencies of these five moves are quite different. The total occurrences of move1STR-Situating the Research and move2PTR-Presenting the Research were the highest of the five moves. The findings revealed that move1and move2were seen to be the obligatory moves for the English majors;3) the number of moves used in the abstract correlated with the amount of information departed. The abstracts with only one move could not adequately provide the information of the theses. In contrast, a complete five-move abstract provided a succinct overview of the study.Examinations of language errors indicated that:1) The lexical and syntactic errors occurred the most frequently in the five types of errors.2) Mechanical errors in these five types of errors ranked the third place. And this type of errors could have easily been avoided if writers had paid more attention or spend a little more time checking and reviewing their drafts before the final submission.3) There were23.60%of abstracts stylistic errors which indicated that the language used in these abstracts were quite colloquial.The present research findings indicated that both in terms of macro structure and the micro language usage, a lot of deficiencies exist in the English abstracts written by Chinese EFL undergraduates. It is suggested that formal and constant training is essential to acquaint student writers of graduation thesis with the knowledge of the format, rhetorical moves and language style of academic writing.