Abstract: As a subfield of science and engineering, chemical engineering has a high requirement for its researchers on international publication. A well-designed abstract can help them a lot to be promoted to the editors and other researchers in the same field. In this study, a comparison of rhetorical moves in the abstracts of published research articles (RA) and bachelor's degree theses of Chinese students was made to find out the rhetorical move pattern in RA abstracts as well as their differences from bachelor's degree theses to shed light on the gaps between student writers and expert writers on abstract writing and provide some feedback to EAP writing in China. Using Santos’ (1996) five move pattern as the model of analysis, the data indicated that STF, DTM and PTR were the obligatory moves in RA abstracts, with a high incidence of DTM move being embedded. A significant difference was found in the use of STR and STF moves between the abstracts from the two corpora. In terms of linguistic features of RA abstracts, the past simple tense and passive voice were preferred in PTR move, and in STF move, all the results and outcomes were foregrounded by different linguistic strategies. But for student writers, there were a lot to do in their language use. Finally, some suggestions were proposed.

 

rhetorical moves; abstract; chemical engineering; comparison study