Examining teacher-written conference abstracts: Rhetorical functions and syntactic complexity features

Abstract

This study explored the characteristics of accepted conference abstracts (CAs) written by language teachers for a large-scale national conference on English Language Teaching (Best Practices in Language Education Conference; BEST) compared to those produced by researchers or teacher-researchers for the teaching-oriented strands of a large-scale international conference on Applied Linguistics (American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference; AAAL). The comparative analysis focused on three rhetorical features of the abstracts (move-step realization, embeddedness, and sequence) and move-specific syntactic complexity features. Adopting the CA move/step framework of Yoon and Casal (2020a), we examined rhetorical functions and syntactic features in 60 abstracts from each conference: all BEST abstracts and the abstracts accepted to the two pedagogy-oriented strands of the AAAL conference. Our findings generally indicate prominent differences between BEST and AAAL writers in their use of moves, steps, and embedded steps. They also show differences between the two groups in terms of the use of some syntactic measures, such as the length of sentences and the use of complex nominals. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of the CA genre and provide insight into language teachers’ research literacy with a focus on CA writing, which may be useful for the development of evidence-based CA writing guidelines for teachers.