A Rhetorical Move Analysis of Algerian Academics’ Research Article Abstracts

Abstract

The research article abstract, generally considered as a miniature representation of the whole article, is of paramount significance and serves as a selection, screening and an indexing tool. Despite its importance, this part-genre has not received adequate academic interest in the Algerian context. Accordingly, the present paper examines 43 abstracts from articles published in applied linguistics by Algerian academics in terms of conventional rhetorical organization. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the academics’ commitment to any of the widely accepted models, and to explore their specific traits and idiosyncrasies while writing an abstract for their research papers. The abstracts have been quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed with reference to Bhatia’s (1993), Hyland’s (2000) and Santos’s (1996) generic models. The findings show some deviations at the level of generic structure, function and content of moves. The predominant pattern of writing abstracts is found to be purpose-methodology-findings where these moves (2, 3 & 4) are more recurrent than ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’ (moves 1 and 5 respectively). Furthermore, despite the textual existence of certain moves, they do not correspond to their actual rhetorical role. It has also been observed that one-third of the abstracts display an unconventional move of reviewing the literature that does not belong in a research article abstract. These tendencies could be related to the lack of research and instruction on the different part-genres of a research article, and academic writing in general in Algerian higher education institutions. Received: 30 August 2023 / Accepted: 23 October 2023 / Published: 5 November 2023