TESOL conference abstracts: discrepancies between potential writers‘ knowledge and actual composition

摘要

The ability to write a successful conference abstract seems to be one barrier preventing new researchers fromuddisseminating their research work in their particular disciplinary community. However, very few studies on howudconference abstracts are structured have been conducted in order to help such novice researchers. This study,udthus, aims to examine the rhetorical structure of conference abstracts in two TESOL conferences in Asia withudthe purpose of informing a particular group of new researchers in Asian settings about the actual practice ofudwriting this particular genre. The findings from the open-ended questions and the move analysis of 137udabstracts indicated that there was a mismatch between these potential conference abstract writers’ knowledgeudand the actual composition of these conference abstracts. Besides the rhetorical structures of conferenceudabstracts, this paper also provided some pedagogical suggestions on dealing with this mismatch.