A Contrastive Genre Analysis of English Abstract in Linguistic Journals Written by Chinese and English Writers

This paper contrastively studies the generic structures of sixty abstracts from English teaching and learning journals written by Chinese writers and English native writers.Analysis of the data is based on Swales’ IMRD(Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion) model and all the data are coded through SPSS.Result indicates 1) English natives tend to write longer than Chinese.2) The rhetorical structure of the abstract tends to be more complete in the international journals.3) English natives tend to write more about the background details while the Chinese natives focus more on the result explanation.It is hoped that this comparison would shed some lights on abstract writing for Chinese writers.