An Analysis of Rhetorical Moves and Cohesion in Abstracts of Literature Journal Articles
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Abstract
An abstract is considered as the essential part of an article. However, the textual organization of the abstracts in diverse genres may differ, which is likely to cause confusion and concern among novice EFL scholars. Also, so far there have been few practical models available on how to write a well-composed literature research article (LRAs) abstract. Therefore, to fill in this missing piece, the present researcher conducted an analysis of abstracts in LRAs, with the main focus on rhetorical moves and generic patterns together with grammatical cohesion. With the top-down corpus-based approach of move analysis, the move structure model was modified from the models proposed by Doró (2013), Santos (1996), Swales and Feak (2009), and Tankó (2017). The corpus consisted of 88 abstracts from two international journals. The abstracts were analyzed and coded by considering the functional roles of each structural unit which variably fell into different ‘moves’ and ‘submoves’, and grammatical cohesion. Two research instruments were employed including: MS Excel 2013 and AntConc Version 3.5.8.0. The results indicated that, of eight moves, the Findings (M6) was the most frequent move, and LRA abstracts revealed five generic patterns with three stable moves functioning as Research Presentation (M4), Methodology (M5), and Findings (M6). Regarding grammatical cohesion, the reference type of cohesive devices was the most utilized in LRA abstracts. The findings could serve as a practical guideline for novice EFL scholars providing detailed information as to how LRA abstracts should be composed and organized to meet the standards for literary research publications.
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