The rhetorical organization of research article abstracts in education

Abstract

The study of organization-structure of abstracts as an academic genre is essential for proper academic literacy and the consequent dissemination of scientific knowledge. This study describes the rhetorical organization of abstracts of research articles in the area of education. In order to do this, the generic structure of 50 texts from Estudios Pedagógicos magazine from Universidad Austral de Chile, is analyzed using a top-down approach (Rhetorical Moves of Swales and Feak, 2009). The results show two basic patterns in 46% of the texts that make up the corpus (M2, M3, M4, (M5), while the rest do not follow a consistent preset pattern. This suggests the need to strengthen the discourse skills within the academic and scientific communities.