How do native English academic writers and Chinese native speakers writing in English promote their research

This paper reports on an investigation of a rhetorical organization of Applied Linguistics abstracts produced in Anglophone and Chinese academic discourse communities and written by native English and native Chinese speaking scholars. The study utilises the Framework for the Analysis of the Rhetorical Structure of Texts (FARS), proposed by Golebiowski (2009, 2011). FARS provides a functional account of the relational structure of texts in terms of strategies employed by writers to achieve their communicative purposes. I show how the two groups of abstracts utilize different relational schemata in order to indicate the functional prominence of textual propositions. It is proposed that relational choices, which result in differences in the accentuation of communicative messages in the two groups of abstracts, are dictated by cultural traditions and conventions underlying the discourse community into which the authors have been socialized.