genre analysis of english for specific purposes research article abstracts: deciphering the possible generic

Research article abstracts, as an academic genre, play a central role in academic discourse communities. reviewing the abstracts determines the fate of a research article, to be or not to be accepted and embraced. the first impression that abstracts leave on the reviewers makes this genre more delicate. bearing this in mind, the current paper aims to explore the generic structure of research article abstracts in one of the major sub-disciplines of applied linguistics, that is english for specific purposes (esp), which is highly concerned with the genre analysis and its implications in gearing the courses to the needs of specific discourse communities. to this end, 50 research article abstracts will be drawn from the relevant refereed journals and will be analyzed in light of hyland’s five-move (introduction, purpose, method, product, conclusion). the results will be reported in the full paper after coding the constituent moves in the articles of the corpus. the findings will enrich the existing literature and carry pedagogical implications for research article writers and academic writing instructors.