A Genre Analysis of English and Iranian Research Articles Abstracts in Applied Linguistics and Mathematics

In recent years, genre studies have attracted the attention of many researchers. The aim of the present study was to observe the differences in generic structure of abstract written by English native and non-native (Iranian) students in two disciplines of mathematics and applied linguistics. To this end, twenty native English students’ abstract texts from each discipline and the same number of non-native (Iranian) ones were selected. In this study, Hyland’s (2000) five‐move model was used to identify the rhetorical structure of the four sets of texts. After analyzing each text, the main moves were extracted and the frequencies of each one were calculated and compared. The cross-disciplinary and cross‐linguistic analyses reveal that linguistics abstracts follow a conventional scheme, but mathematics abstracts in these two languages do not exhibit the usual norms in terms of moves. Besides, greater difference in move structure is seen across languages in mathematics. The findings of the study have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for graduate students, especially students from non-English backgrounds in order to facilitate their successful acculturation into these disciplinary communities.