Role of Moves, Tenses, and Metadiscourse in the Abstract of an Acceptable Research Article

The first part the reviewers of journals article read in any research is its abstract. It tells the summary of the research and defines the language used by the researcher. Thus, well-written abstract is necessary for all academic writers who consider publishing their papers. Certainly, writers could find it difficult to write abstract if they are not very familiar with the moves and the linguistic features associated with it. Therefore, this study aims to explore the rhetorical moves in the abstracts of 59 published research articles selected from two disciplines specified in English. Furthermore, it examines the verb tense and the metadiscourse features in each move. All Research Articles (RAs) were published in Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities from 2011 until 2015. Two models proposed by Hyland in (2000) and (2005) were used as analytical frameworks in the present study. The findings showed that some rhetorical moves seemed to have higher occurrences than the others. Regarding the verb tense, present tense was found to be more preferable tense in the process of writing abstract. Moreover, interactive metadiscourse features appeared more frequently than interactional features. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2s1p37