Comparison of Abstracts Written by Native Speakers and Second Language Learners

Abstract

As an ideal vehicle for projecting news value, the journal abstract appears to be growing in importance, as noted by a number of writers, but the studies are still not enough, especially comparison study between the abstracts written by native speaker and second language learner. So this paper tries to find out both similarities and differences in structure of abstracts from these two groups through genre analysis of two corpuses: one for abstracts from native speakers, the other for abstracts from Chinese English learners. The results indicate that the Chinese learners focus too much on introduction move and can’t use tense properly in all cased. This result leads us to consider the teaching of writing for special purpose.