post graduate Student,in Teaching English as a Forein Language,Tarbiat Moalem University.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare the rhetorical structure of research article abstracts published in The ESP Journal 27 years ago with those published in this journal in 2007. The structural units that constitute the macrostructure of these abstracts are identified following Martin (2003). The results indicate that there are similarities between both groups of abstracts as they present the four basic structural units that constitute different sections of a research article. However, some differences were also observed between the two groups of abstracts. The author has tried to account for these differences in the conclusion section of the article.
