Generic Models of Abstract Writing in Research Articles of Engineering Management

Xiao Xianming

School of Foreign Languages,Wuhan University of Technology,Wuhan,China

E-mail:ericaxiaoxm@whut.edu.cn

Liu Qian

School of Foreign Languages,Wuhan University of Technology,Wuhan,China

E-mail:1772199707@qq.com

[Abstract] The abstract is a distinctive genre for research article.Based on a self-built corpus containing 60 excerpted abstracts from two journals in engineering management,this paper explores the rhetorical move models and the linguistic features of moves in abstract.The results show that the moves of introduction,method and result are obligatory in abstracts.In addition,a combination of linguistic features,such as tense,voice and grammatical subjects could be helpful for distinguishing move structures in abstracts.The findings are helpful to sort out the structure and characteristics of the abstract,and reduce irregular writing errors in the writing of future English papers.

[Keywords] abstracts;linguistic features;generic move

Introduction

Abstract in the research article is a distinctive genre and has evolved to be a well-defined and mutually-under?stood communicative text irrespective of the subject-discipline they serve.The American National Standards Insti?tute(ANSI)has defined abstract as follows:"An abstract is an abbreviated,accurate representation of the contents of a document,preferably prepared by its author(s) for publication with it" (ANSI,1979,p.1).Intentionally,the func?tion of an abstract is to assist readers by offering a preliminary overview of the research and saving their time.For this sense,John Swales defines abstract as a summary and a'purified'reflection of the entire article,while Bhatia em?phasizes the informative function of abstracts,claiming that they present"a faithful and accurate summary,which is representative of the whole article"(Bhatia,1993).Therefore,abstracts have increasingly become obligatory indepen?dent genre in original articles published in scholarly journals(Van Dijk,1980).

Abstracts have captured the essence of the research article;thus they have tended to be a promising genre to study.Researchers in the field of EAP (English for Academic Purposes) have investigated extensive studies of ab?stracts in research articles.Most of the studies have delineated the macro-structure of abstracts in terms of the con?stituent moves,and described the lexicon-grammatical features mainly from two aspects:the schematic structure of abstract and the linguistic features of abstract.The macro-structure of abstracts has been mainly discussed from in?troduction,purpose,method and result,namely in terms of John Swales'generic theory of the four moves.Bhatia(1993)and Santos(1996)laid firm foundations for this tendency of abstract research,especially Santos'contribution of postulating an additional move of "situating the research" in the applied linguistic field,typically accounting for the model of five moves in abstract schematic structure.Salager-Meyer(1992)studied the distribution of verb tenses and modality across the different moves in abstracts.Flowerdew (2001) investigated the authorial voice and pointed out that authorial voice,namely the expressions of the writer's attitude towards a proposition could be a knotty issue for the novice writers.

Although some studies have compared abstracts from broad senses such as social science,engineering,and hu?manities,most studies cast the eyesight upon abstract research in a specific discipline.Hyland(2000,2004)conduct?ed the research of abstracts from eight disciplines with the model of five moves and improved the introduction move to contain the research motivation.Hucking(2001)investigated abstracts in biomedical articles and revealed the ex?clusive move of purpose in their overall organization.

Despite the abundance of research on the componential structure and linguistic analyses of abstracts,novice practitioners are still in want for a more comprehensive generic framework that would allow for cross-disciplinary writing of the rhetorical moves in abstracts and would therefore access the essential models of instructional materials and technologies to qualifiedly address discipline specificity.In a middle-scale project of self-built abstract corpus for engineering management,we set out to accomplish a two-fold goal:(1) to validate and devise move models of PBMRC or IMRD in engineering management discipline,and(2)to quantitatively operationalize visual linguistic fea?tures realization of aspects,voices and tenses in abstract writing.The knowledge of both generic organization of an abstract and the quantitative description of the linguistic features of the moves will be of great value for the effective pedagogical practice to novice writers.

Methodology

Construction of the abstract corpus

A total of 60 research article abstracts were selected from the top two journals in the areas of engineering man?agement to build a small-scale corpus of abstracts:Automation in Construction and International Journal of Project Management.These abstracts were published during November 2020 to June 2021,tending to reflect current writing practices.In order to balance the corpus,the number of abstracts excerpted from the two journals is basically the same to be 30.Table 1 shows the basic details of the corpus.

Table 1.The statistic details of the abstract corpus

Microsoft Excel is adopted to count the words of each abstract and the total number of the sentences embodied in the corpus.The number of words in the abstract ranges from 141 to 376.The number of sentences in the abstract ranges from 4 to 23 sentences with an average of 9 sentences per abstract.The statistics indicates that abstract writ?ing in research articles prefers concise language to describe the complete core information.

Approach to Coding the rhetorical move structure of the abstract

Studies on the sentence functional structure of abstracts originated from Graetz's initiative idea:problem-meth?od-result-conclusion (Graetz,1985).John Swales' proposal of the four-move model since 1990 has stipulated the rhetorical research approach to abstract analyses:Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion.Another major issue in most studies of abstract is the identification of moves.There are two ways for researchers to recognize the moves:a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach.The former refers to distinguish moves in terms of linguistic signals as lexical and grammatical items while the latter means the recognition of moves on the basis of content.Currently,most researchers in move analysis have been employing a cyclical rather than a circular approach,i.e.,they first use the top-down(content clues),which will be then corroborated or modified by a manual scrutiny of the lexical linguis?tic signals.

Based on the above approaches,our research adopts the five-language-move model and the top-down ap?proach to encoding the sentence structure of the abstracts,namely,the moves of introduction,purpose,methods,re?sults,and conclusions.Their symbolic codes are specifically as follows:M1 is the introductory speech move—intro?ducing the research background and significance of the research;M2 is the objective move—indicating the research purpose and content of the research;M3 is the method move—describing the research method data;M4 is the result move—showing the findings of the research;M5 is the conclusion move—expressing the meaning of the research re?sults.

In order to simplify quantitative statistics and subsequent analyses,the abbreviated forms of encoding the differ?ent moves are as follows:introduction(I),purpose(P),methods(M),results(R),and discussion(D).

Results and discussion

Move structure of the abstracts

Types of The move

Generally speaking,the content of the abstract composes of five parts:introduction,objectives,methods,re?sults,and discussion.By encoding each content of the abstract,we analyzed the quantity and frequency of each con?tent with statistical data.Table 2 shows the detailed statistics of each move in the corpus.Statistic data show that the five moves in abstracts appear in combination.Introduction and research methods,with more than 96% of abstracts including them,are the two most frequently used content in abstracts.Result with 95%follows the I and R to be the second most frequently used of abstracts.The purpose and discussion moves are not used very frequently,and per?haps the author finds it more valuable to put them in the main text.

Table 2.Move Frequency

Table 3.Patterns of occurrence of moves

The high frequencies of I,M,and R indicate that the abstract is decently and inevitably condensed in research articles.The particularly prominent rate of the three moves may also be the result of the author's desire to promote their research significance.In other words,writers believe that a well-conducted abstract including these three moves will increase the chance of their articles being spotlighted.

Considering that the move R and D are not quite frequently used but still more than two-thirds of the abstracts containing them,we attempt to explain it might be the tactical decision for writers to strengthen the propaganda as?pect of the abstract.

Discussing moves may be the traditional one,although authors might choose to hide the content of move D.However,caution should be exercised when interpreting the patterns found in this section,as there are differences in corpus size,journal source,and article type in the above studies.

The order of the move structure

Through manual recognition and data statistics,the move patterns adopted by the 60 abstracts has been shown in Table 3.The pattern of four moves is the most,followed by the pattern of containing five moves,which means that most abstracts will contain four to five moves.The move structure of each abstract roughly conforms to the I-P-MR-D model with a few exceptions of missing.

Table 4.Distribution of voices in Moves

Distribution of tense

Corpus statistics shows that there are three common tenses for abstracts in engineering management research ar?ticles:simple present tense,simple past tense and present perfect tense.The distributions of tense show certain kinds of regulations:the present tense mainly appears in the moves of I,P,and D.In the introduction moves,simple present tense accounts for approximately 85%of the total abstract,and some may use the present perfect tense.This is plausibly because the content and background that need to be introduced are given information in the subject field.About 75%of the purpose moves use the simple present tense,and about 84%for the result moves and conclu?sion moves respectively.The simple present tense is used to introduce the content,probably because it not only em?phasizes the need for timeliness of research methods,but also emphasizes the objective factual attributes of research methods.

The simple past tenses are dominantly employed in the method moves,exposing the connotation of the timeli?ness of research methods.The present perfect tense mainly occurs in the introductory and purpose moves,indicating a similar research or a specific research program or outcome mentioned in previous research.

Voice of the abstract

The choice of voice was subjected to the different move categories.Whereas more active verbs than passive ones were found in the corpus.The distribution of active voice predominantly occurs in the purpose move(74%),the result move(66%)and the conclusion move(88%),while the passive voice is convergent in the method move(87%).One possible explanation is that the move of method more often begins with a description of a research territory fol?lowed by retrieving what and how has been done by other researchers.This description need to keep fairly imperson?al with the presence of more passive verbs than in the other moves.As a contrast,the frequency of active and passive voice occurrence in the introductory move slightly shares the equality with 52%for the active voice and 48%for the passive voice.Data distribution from the corpus regarding the use of active and passive voice in the five moves is giv?en below:

Conclusion

The above statistics and analysis have shown that there are some differences in terms of move functions and lin?guistic features for realizing the generic structure in abstract.On the other hand,the realization of linguistic features in abstract is fairly similar across journals,which suggests that certain linguistic features for moves are comparative?ly fixed by its inner requirement of generic structure.Therefore,the tense and voice embodied in different moves need to be suited for the inner functions of each move undertaking in abstract generic structure.The statistical data from the corpus has revealed that the introduction move,method move,result and discussion move are obligatory in abstracts.Whereas the purpose move is the least frequency in abstract structure from all articles.

Differentiating from the generic macro-move structure,the distribution of linguistic feature patterns of voice and tense in the same move in different articles are quite similar across the journals.However,their occurrence fre?quency vary dramatically across moves.For example,the passive voice and past tense are likely to converge in meth?od move.

On the whole,the findings of this study could be of value for pedagogical implications.Journal articles contain generic features which could not be intuitively observed through empirical practice.Theoretical writing course for ac?ademic research might be the efficient way for novice writers and post graduates to fill in the gap of disqualified writ?ing.In addition,the generic models of abstract and the rhetorical linguistic features of each move should be incorpo?rated into the teaching materials for academic writing,which will help students foster the awareness of generic orga?nization of abstract and express the rhetorical moves properly.

Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by the Projects of"Course Reform on EAP for Doctoral Candidates Based on Thematic Progression Theory",Project number:w2020162 and"Teaching Corpus for Doctoral English for Academic Purposes 2021";financially sponsored by WUT.Great thanks should be conveyed to Liu Li for her data collection support.