English and Arabic abstracts in medical research articles: A contrastive study

Abstract

AbstractAbstracts in academic research serve important functions. An abstract is a summary of an entire article or thesis that defines its objectives, research problem, methodology, major findings, and implications. Abstracts help potential readers to decide whether the article is relevant to their work. Thus, it saves their time and effort. This study aims to answer the following questions: (1) To what extent are the move structures in English and Arabic medical abstracts similar or different, (2) How are metadiscourse features similar or different in English and Arabic medical abstracts? The sample of the study consisted of 120 abstracts (60 English and 60 Arabic) extracted from three major medical journals that require bilingual Arabic and English abstracts. The move structure and metadiscourse features in bilingual abstracts were analyzed using Hyland’s models of 2000 and 2005. The move stability was classified according to Kanoksilapatham’s (2005) model. Both Arabic and English abstracts showed similar move structure patterns, with the method and product moves being obligatory; the purpose and conclusion moves were conventional, and the introduction move was optional. English and Arabic abstracts employed interactive metadiscourse features more than interactional ones. The interactive metadiscourse features in Arabic displayed a higher frequency than those in English, but the interactional metadiscourse features had a lower frequency in the Arabic abstracts than those in English. Transitions were the most used form of interactive metadiscourse features, whereas self-mention and hedges were most common among the interactional metadiscourse features in both Arabic and English abstracts. Arabic and English medical abstracts showed a homogenous rhetorical move structure across both languages. However, their metadiscourse features showed a significant divergence. The findings of such a paper may have theoretical and practical implications. They may contribute to contrastive textology and genre studies since they highlight the similarities and differences between English and Arabic article abstracts. The findings can also be used in training researchers in writing research abstracts.

Keywords

• move structure
• Metadiscourse
• Interactive
• Interactional
• transitions
• self-mention