Comparative Genre Analysis of Research Abstracts: Philippine Versus International Colloquia

Abstract

Abstract is the gateway to whether the intended audience reads the rest of the research article or not. This is one of the many reasons why, across disciplines and cultures, the rhetorical structure of research article abstracts has been explored. Taking a different approach, this comparative genre-based study, which employed a hybrid method, investigated the rhetorical structure of research abstracts of non-native English-speaking undergraduate students in Philippine and international research colloquia. A corpus of 116 research abstracts, 58 from each group, in the field of education was purposively selected and explored using Hyland’s model of five-move abstracts. Categories of move occurrence along with the frequencies were utilized to compare the move use of the two groups. Findings indicated that the three moves which are purpose, method, and product frequently occurred in local and international writers’ research conference abstracts. The number of words was also recorded through frequency and average. The local conference abstracts were lengthier than the international ones. The findings can have some pedagogical implications for the academic writing professors and assist novice writers or undergraduate students, primarily those in the field of teacher education in organizing their abstracts for the international audiences.