Hieng-hiong Lau

Ming Hsin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

 

Abstract

Academic writing has been recognized to be embedded in wider social practices which assume participant relationships and determine how discourse should be structured and negotiated. Various discourse features of academic journal articles have been demonstrated to signal institutional and intertextual constraints (Hyland, 2000). This paper investigates structural elements of abstracts in academic journal articles relating to life science. We attempt to show how factors other than disciplinary interests and beliefs might also affect structural configurations of academic abstracts. We collected 80 instances of abstracts as the research data, including 50 samples from academic journal articles by Taiwanese PhD students of life science and the other 30 by foreign scholars of the same field. We found that the student writers tend to provide less background information in their abstracts. A substantial number of student abstracts present only a series of experimental results plus some concluding statements. The relatively less contextualization of the student abstracts might be due to factors like student writers’ academic immaturity and their English proficiency. Our results might have some implications to the teaching of academic English in a foreign language situation.

 

台灣博士生撰寫期刊摘要之架構分析

 

劉賢軒

明新科技大學

 

摘要

學術寫作近年來已經被認定是包含在社會實際互動之中,作者必須認清且界定和讀者間的關係, 並決定文字論述該如何建構與透過溝通協調的過程產出。許多學術文章的語篇特點已經顯示能夠標記組織架構上的與互文間的限制。本篇文章將會探討生命科學領域 之學術期刊摘要架構。我們將會揭示除了對於學門本身的興趣與信念之外,還有其他若干因素將會影響學術期刊摘要的架構配置。本研究收集了80篇學術摘要做為 樣本。其中有50篇來自於台灣生命科學領域的博士生;另外30篇則是出自於相同學術領域的國外學者。研究結果顯示,台灣博士生所寫的摘要內容傾向於提供較 少的背景知識,有許多摘要內僅呈現了一系列的實驗結果與結論。在這群博士生所寫的摘要中出現較少的語境線索也許可以歸因於某些因素,像是學生對於此領域的 認知程度尚未成熟,或受限於英語能力。期許本研究結果對於英文的教學將有所貢獻。