A Thematic progression analysis of rhetorical moves in research article abstracts
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Date
2024
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University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Due to its exceptionality as a stand-alone part-genre, writing a research article abstract has been an extensive area of research within the realm of genre analysis; yet, it has not received significant academicattention in the Algerian context from the perspective of discourse analysis. Hence, the current research endeavors to uncover the Algerian academics’ rhetorical and thematic tendencies while writing a research article abstract. To meet the research aim, applying a qualitative descriptive research design, a preliminary corpus of 86 abstracts of applied linguistics articles written by Algerian academics between 2019 and 2023 was scrutinized in terms of rhetorical moves. After eliminating the abstracts that provide only one and two progression types a corpus of 37 abstracts was obtained and then analyzed. The analysis combined three models Hyland’s (2000), Halliday’s (1994), and Danes’s (1974). After analyzing the abstracts, the findings of the rhetorical move analysis indicate the predominance of both the introduction-purpose-method-product and introduction-purpose patterns with a similar frequency of occurrences (17,44% for each). However, the results of the thematic choice and thematic progression analysis surprisingly reveal the predominance of the ruptured no relationship progression pattern across the moves with a percentage of 61,98% besides some instances of the linear (23,97%) and constant progression (14,05%) patterns. These tendencies could be related to the authors' willingness to conform to the abstract’s structural conventions to fit the publication requirements without paying attention to the appropriate choice and placing of Themes. Therefore, these findings recommend that academic writing syllabus designers integrate these two elements within the teaching courses in concordance with the genre knowledge to improve the students’ writing skill proficiency.