Abstract—Coherent writing skills have a strong correlation
with the quality of English writing. Abstract, as a relatively
independent and complete discourse form that condenses the
content of academic discourse, can predict and dominate the
content and structure of the main text. This paper collects a total
of 40 academic paper abstracts in the discipline of applied
linguistics, 20 from Chinese students and 20 from international
scholars, to compare the different distribution of cohesive
devices between Chinese student writers and international
Journal writers. Based on the study, we find that there is no
significant difference in the frequency, type, and control of
cohesive devices used by Chinese students and international
scholars. But Chinese students overuse some types of cohesive
devices, especially in the use of the conjunctive device “and”.
The use of “I” has never appeared in the corpus of Chinese
students and the usage of “we” has been used by Chinese student
writers and international Journal writers. This paper also shows
that Chinese English majors actively keep up with international
journals and have a sense of international writing in the process
of learning writing.
Index Terms—Abstract, academic discourse, contrastive
study, cohesive device
Ya Xu and Yi Zhang are with school of foreign studies, Northwestern
Polytechnical University (NPU), Shaanxi, Xi’an, CO 710000 China. E-mail:
xuyaaa@mail.nwpu.edu.cn (Y.X.)
*Correspondence: yizhang@nwpu.edu.cn (Y.Z.)
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Cite:Ya Xu and Yi Zhang, "The Analysis of Grammatical Cohesive Devices in the Abstract of Academic Discourse," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 472-477, 2023.