Move Structures and Lexico-Grammatical Patterns of Abstracts of CALL Research Articles and M.A. Theses: A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis

Abstracts play a significant role in providing essential information of research articles. In spite of the importance of abstracts, graduates have difficulties in organizing the structure and choosing appropriate linguistic patterns and words to express their ideas. This study aims to examine the move structures and lexico-grammatical patterns in the articles of Language Learning and Technology (LLT) and to compare them with those of Korean masters theses to find problems in their abstract writing. 130 abstracts of the journal articles and 103 abstracts of M.A. theses were collected and analyzed. To analyze the abstract texts, the corpus analyzer tools, AntConc and AntMover were used. The abstracts of LLT and M.A. theses were analyzed with Swales and Feak’s (2004) Background-Aim-Method-Result-Conclusion(BAMRC) framework. The results of the study showed that move patterns, AMR and BAMR were more frequent than BAMRC in LLT, meanwhile abstracts from M.A. theses tended to follow BAMRC. As for the lexico-grammatical patterns, the ample lexico-grammatical examples of each move in journal articles were identified. However, graduates showed limited language patterns with a small vocabulary size in abstract writing. Based on the findings, an instructional model of corpus-based genre writing is provided.