THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF REVIEW ARTICLE ABSTRACTS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PUBLISHED IN HIGH-IMPACT INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS

It is generally recognized that an abstract is just a short text, but it offers
multifaceted benefits since it can inspire audiences to read the whole
article and cite it for their work. Most importantly, a good abstract is the
first step to a successful publication in a discourse community. However,
writing a good abstract to publish in a high-impact international journal is
quite challenging. Therefore, writing a well-constructed abstract based on
the guideline is the best solution for writers. So far, the study on how to
arrange rhetorical moves for writing the abstract of the review article is
very limited while this kind of article embeds many merits for the academic
field. With this regard, the objective of this study is to investigate the
rhetorical structure of review article abstracts in applied linguistics
published in high-impact international journals. Specifically, it aims to
discover the type of moves, identify how each move is constructed, and
explore a common move pattern in those abstracts. The model obtained
from the pilot project was used as the checklist to analyze the 50 review
article abstracts selected from four high-impact international journals in
the field of applied linguistics. The results show that five moves namely
Background, Objective, Method, Synthesis of Discussion, and Conclusion
are identified. The first two moves are regarded as conventional while the
last three moves are optional. Moreover, the outcomes indicate that some
moves in the abstracts are constructed differently in terms of content and
structure especially the linguistic features compared to the research article
abstracts. The findings also reveal that Background-Objective-Synthesis
of Discussion (B-O-SoD) is the common move pattern. As the practical
implication, writers should follow the common move pattern and linguistic
properties as shown by this study when writing a review article abstract in
order to attract more audiences or publish in respectable international
journals. As a theoretical application, this study can be used to support
future studies also.
Keywords: Abstract; Applied Linguistics; Non-research Article; Review
Article; Rhetorical Structure