Investigating Rhetorical Moves in Thesis Abstracts: Disciplinary Variations in Agricultural Engineering and Natural Resources Engineering

Given the important role of the Abstract section in a thesis, the present study aimed at analyzing theses’ Abstracts in two disciplines of Agricultural Engineering and Natural Resources Engineering. To this end, 80 theses of agricultural engineering and 80 theses of natural resources engineering were selected randomly from University of Tehran and Tarbiat Modarres University. Then, Hyland’s (2000) model, which is composed of five moves, was used to identify and describe the rhetorical structure of the Abstracts. The findings revealed that all the selected Abstracts contained the “purpose”, “method”, and “result” moves. The significant differences between the Abstracts of these two disciplines lied in the “introduction” and “conclusion” moves. In the Natural Resources Engineering’ Abstracts, these two moves were more frequent than those of Agricultural Engineering. Thus, It can be concluded that mover 1 and move 5 are more frequent, and perhaps obligatory, in Natural Resources Engineering’ theses Abstracts and less frequent in Agricultural Engineering’ theses Abstracts. This study has implications for EAP course and materials developers, instructors, and evaluators. Further studies could also compare the Persian Abstracts with their English counterparts to find the possible discrepancies between these two sets of Abstracts.