A Cross-disciplinary Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts: Computer Science and Applied Linguistics

The purpose of the present cross-disciplinary study is to investigate the generic organization of abstract sections of Computer Science (CS) and Applied Linguistics (AL) research articles by Iranian nonnative speakers of English published in international journals. To this end, a total number of 40 articles were selected from the established journals, 20 in each discipline. The corpus was then analyzed based on Swales’ (2004) Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Cross-disciplinary analysis revealed different generic organization in the two corpora. Results of chi-square display that there are statistically significant differences in the use of Move 2 Step 1A (counterclaiming in the previous studies), Move2 Step1D (Adding to what is known), Move3 Step5 (Announcing principle outcome) and Move3 Step 6(Stating the value of the present research). In other words, the AL corpus applied these moves and steps more significantly than CS corpus. Such results might elucidate that in applied linguistics there is higher tendency in using the moves and their steps when developing a research article. The findings of this study may promise some implications for ESP pedagogy and ESP trainers and students.