Genre analysis of English-written Master’s theses and dissertation abstracts in the setting of Prešov University

Abstract

The genre of abstract is an important part of academic writing which functions as an eye-catcher inducing other members of a particular discourse community to read the original work. While conference abstracts (CA) and research article abstracts (RA) have been widely discussed from the perspective of genre analysis, the importance of thesis abstracts (TA) has been, on the other hand, neglected. According to the present paper, TA embodies the essential step in development of a student’s academic writing skills. Moreover, this study examines the issue of English-written TA with the focus on five widely used rhetorical moves, tense and grammatical subject used by the students of Management at Prešov University. The corpus of 33 Master’s and 33 Dissertation thesis abstracts shows a common preference for the moves of Problem Statement and Methodology, whereas the most significant moves of Results and Conclusion are sparsely included. The phenomenon of tenses displays the predominance of the present simple and it is pointed out that the students prefer non-personal Discourse Domain grammatical subjects. The results confirm the underestimated position of TA and show how its genre features are characteristic of the Slovak academic setting.