Abstract

TOVAR VIERA, Rodrigo; CASTRO BUNGACHO, Sonia  and  CHILUISA CHILUISA, Marcia. Rhetorical structures in abstracts of scientific articles published in Ecuadorian and North American Journals. Universidad y Sociedad [online]. 2019, vol.11, n.5, pp. 316-326.  Epub Dec 02, 2019. ISSN 2218-3620.

The community of national and international academic discourses has put emphasis on abstracts of scientific articles (RAC), because they are an important part in all disciplines and languages. In fact, summaries attract readers and increase indexing and citation opportunities. On the other hand, they determine the importance of the articles and classify them as good or ambiguous. The present study examines the rhetorical structures of abstracts in scientific articles written in English by native and non-native speakers. The abstracts were selected from Ecuadorian and North American magazines, published in 2010-2016. The research adopts the model of rhetorical structure of Hyland (2000), such as: introduction, purpose, method, product and conclusion. The analysis is based on a corpus of eighty summaries of humanities and sciences. The results reveal rhetorical variations in their construction in four disciplines: education, sociology, electronics and agronomy. However, the texts written in English by natives and non-natives followed a hierarchical structure of five movements, with three stable rhetorical structures: purpose, method and product. The results of the research affirm that academic writing must be well organized in terms of content and structure; in such a way that readers have a clear and concrete idea of the document. In addition, it throws pedagogical and linguistic implications for experts and inexperienced writers, especially for those with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Keywords : Abstracts; academic writing; genre analysis; rhetorical structure.

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