Comparative Analysis of Architecture Research Article Abstracts Written by Native and Non-native Authors: A Cross-linguistic, Cross-cultural Study

Abstract

It is increasingly becoming important to focus on the rhetorical aspects of texts used for creating different discourse types. In point of fact, the abstract section of scientific articles possesses a rhetorically defined structural framework which is very often culture specific. As such, the present study aimed to investigate the abstract section of the articles written by English and Persian authors, in order to explore whether they followed a similar structural pattern. To this end, a corpus of 60 English and Persian abstracts, thirty each, was randomly selected from English ISI journals and Iranian scientific journals and analyzed based on the IMRD framework introduced by Swales (1990). Findings of this study revealed that most English and Persian authors used the IMRD model in the structure of their abstracts; although, the frequency of occurrence of each move was different. In terms of moves’ sequence, all the used patterns were analyzed and I-M-R-D and I-M-R were identified as the most frequent patterns used in both groups. Findings of this study may have implications for Iranian authors who seek to publish their studies in reputable international journals.