Framing the Research and Engaging the Reader in Graduate Engineering Students’ Abstracts

Writing an abstract is a challenging assignment for graduate students as it requires condensing all the extensive research into a few sentences, providing sufficient background knowledge, and presenting findings compellingly to the academic community. This study observes how graduate engineering students cope with writing their abstracts for their first published papers, with a specific focus on metadiscourse. The study is based on the learner corpus of 1,746 abstracts (117,535 words) written by non-native English speakers in English and Serbian during their Master’s studies. The research follows Hyland’s taxonomy, focusing on interactive frame markers and interactional engagement markers, together with metadiscursive nouns in order to uncover cross-linguistic patterns and pedagogical implications. The comparison of the absolute and relative frequency with statistical significance and log likelihood between Serbian and English sub-corpora demonstrates that students tend to use frame markers with greater frequency in Serbian abstracts than in English ones. Additionally, engagement markers, and especially directives, are used twice as often as frame markers in both sub-corpora, with a higher prevalence in English abstracts. Following the qualitative and quantitative analyses, the findings offer pedagogical implications related to the range of frame markers and metadiscursive nouns used by students to introduce their research aims and the range of engagement markers used to engage readers in their research and thus claim their credibility in academic writing.