A structural move analysis of abstract in electronic engineering articles

Genre Analysis of academic and professional texts has been the great inspiration of much of ESP language description in the research articles, and as an important part, the abstract has gained significant attention from the academic communities mostly engineers. Following Swales's (1981) works on genre analysis, studies on different sections of research articles in various languages and fields abound, but only a few studies have been done in Iranian context. This study for the first time sought to recognize different rhetorical features of Moves in abstract section and draw a comparison between Iranian and Native English electronic engineers. To this end, 50 abstracts (25 IrIsI abstracts and 25 N-E abstracts) published in international ISI journals in the area of electronic engineering during 2010-2014 were chosen and were analyzed based on genre analysis models proposed by Santos (1996) and AntMover software. The findings show that abstract section Moves as used by Ir and N-E do not completely correspond to the model proposed by Santos (1996). Moreover, some variations were observed between the Moves used by Ir and N-E. The findings may promise some implications for ESP pedagogy, syllabus design, and materials preparation.