Poster Presentation
Genre-Based Analysis of Movesin Research Abstracts Written byJapanese University Students
Jie Shi
The National University of Electro-Communications
Uma Maheswari Rajagopalan
Integrative Neural Systems Laboratory, RIKENYan YuTama UniversityIntroduction
A research abstract (RA) is a text of foremost importance to students of scienceand engineering at Japanese universities. However, explicit teaching of the form
tends to be missing from general English education for students of the sciences.
Students often resort to direct translation from Japanese to English, which leads
to many problems with structure and cohesion. Treating the RA as a genre usinga Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach (Halliday, 1994; Martin,2000) divides RAs for academic conferences into six moves: 1) Background/Introduction/Problematization; 2)Present Research/Purpose; 3) Methods/
Materials/Procedure; 4) Results/Findings; 5) Highlighting Results, and 6)
Future Works (Swales & Feak, 2009). This presentation reports the findings ofteaching RAs as a supporting genre of the expository genre to third-year students
in an undergraduate English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course at a Japanese125

Shi et al.

Figure 1. Flowchart describing the procedure of data collection

university of science and engineering. The teaching of the six moves of the RA
was adapted from a model having three phases: independent construction,deconstruction, and joint reconstruction, as shown in Figure 1 (Rothery &Stenglin, 1994). The classroom procedure is also shown on the right of the figure.
At the first stage, the students were taught the content of a research article
and asked to independently construct an abstract. Next, through deconstructing
their own abstract drafts, they were taught the required moves of a research
article abstract. In the final phase, students were asked to write a second draft of
the abstract for the same research article with the moves that had been taught.
Abstract drafts from the pre- and post-intervention stages were collectedfrom 20 students and analysed for the number of generic stages and thesequencing of generic moves. Figure 2 shows the results obtained as a histogramof generic stages for pre-intervention (left) and for post-intervention drafts(right). After teaching the moves, the number of students who used all six stages
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Genre-based Analysis of Moves, OnCUE Journal, 7(2), pages 125-129108Number of students

12

Number of students

6420123456840701234567

Generic stages of abstract

Generic stages of abstract

Figure 2. Improvement in the number of generic moves with intervention before (left) and after(right)

increased from 3 in the pre-intervention stage to 13.
Next, the correct sequence of generic stages in the pre- and post-intervention
phases was analysed. After intervention, the stages that were jumbled in thepre-intervention phase followed the proper sequence in the post-intervention
draft. Results of the analysis are shown as a histogram in Figure 3. The numberof students who had correctly sequenced generic stages before teaching themoves was 11; this figure changed to 16 after teaching the moves. A statisticalanalysis using a paired t-test showed these changes were due to intervention witha significance value p of 0.05.
16Correct sequence
Incorrect sequence

Number of students

12840Before

After

Figure 3. Improvement in the sequencing of stages with intervention

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Transitivity and thematic analysis (Coffin et al., 2009) were done with preand post-intervention abstract drafts. Before intervention, there were almost
an equal number of material and verbal processes. After intervention, bothmaterial and verbal processes decreased. With intervention, existential processes
increased from zero to 16%. The mental processes were also found to increase in
the post-intervention phase compared to pre-intervention. Patterning or flow of
information in the abstracts was analysed to find zigzag patterning. In general,the patterning seems to have improved with intervention.
Genre-based teaching of moves of RA abstracts were found to be a very
effective way of teaching students to produce an RA; there was improvement
both in the number of stages and sequencing of stages, as well as some minimal
improvement in zigzag patterning of the stages. In spite of the fact that it was
the first time for students to write an RA, they were able to produce texts
that contained features of a standard abstract. This study suggests that genrebased teaching can be a very useful approach and can be easily adapted to suitclassroom teaching practices, even for students without any prior experience ofabstract writing.

References
Coffin, C., Donohue, J., & North, S. (2009). Exploring English grammar: Fromformal to functional. London, England: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.).
London, England: Edward Arnold.
Martin, J. R. (2000). Design and practice: Enacting functional linguistics.
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 116-126.
Rothery, J., & Stenglin, M. (1994). Spine-chilling stories: A unit of work for juniorsecondary English. Sydney, Australia: Metropolitan East Disadvantaged
Schools Program.
Swales , J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2009). Abstracts and the writing of abstracts (vol. 1).
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Authors’ bios
Professor Jie Shi has been teaching and researching in EFL and Bilingualismin
PRC, Singapore and Japan. She is also an EAP/ESP program developer andcourse designer and a teacher trainer. Her recent interests in research include
corpus linguistics, genre-approach to ESP, and innovation and change theories foreducation. shi.jie@uec.ac.jp
Uma Maheswari Rajagopalan is a research consultant in Brain Science Institute,RIKEN and an ESP teacher at UEC Tokyo. She received her Masters’ in Physics
and Applied Optics from India and Ph.D in Engineering from Hokkaido
University. Her research interests include EST apart from optics in biology andcognitive neuroscience. umamaheswari@toyo.jp
Yan Yu has been teaching in EFL in PRC and Japan for nearly 20 years. Her recentinterests in research include autonomous learning, learner-centered approach, ESP
for science and engineering, and genre-based approach. yu@tama.ac.jp
Received: October 1, 2013
Accepted: February 18, 2014129