Malawi, ZeynebChaira, Farid2018-07-022018-07-022017http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/3852Swales (1981) works on genre analysis has been of great inspiration for many genre analysts for more than two decades. Contrastive genre-based studies of academic text particularly RAs abstracts has gained considerable attention from the discourse community, but only few contrastive genre studies have been done in master's theses abstracts. However, MA theses abstracts written in English and in three different fields such as Sciences of language (SL), Literature (Lit) and Civilization have been exclusively analyzed. The main purpose of the present study was to examine 24 MA theses abstracts written in English by different postgraduates from the three options of English language department of OEB University. The randomly selected corpus will be analyzed based on Swales (1990) CARS model of academic writings. Accordingly, the rhetorical structure _the moves and steps that constitute the macrostructure level was analyzed and compared in terms of move frequency, move order and linguistic realization of each move preformed in the three corpora. The results revealed that Moves preformed by SL, Lit and Civ abstracts do not completely accorder with Swales (1990) three move model. Moreover, MA theses written abstracts set out some remarkable differences due to the differences in students disciplinary backgrounds. The results may promise some implications for graduate students to facilitate their academic writing skill.enGenre analysisContrastive genre analysisAcademic genre analysisOther