What is Communicative Purpose

To disseminate academic knowledge, scholars publish their research in the form of journal articles, whose content is sketched in an abstract with a conventional rhetorical organization. This chapter reports a study that aims to examine and assess the organization of research article abstracts in terms of move units. The move structure of 42 abstracts of English research papers written by Algerian researchers and published in one of the Algerian language journals was scrutinized. The study follows Hyland's analytic model, comprising five rhetorical moves: introduction, purpose, method, product, and conclusion. The findings of the study indicate that the writers predominantly employ the pattern introduction-purpose, with some inconsistencies in using the other moves. On the basis of identifying the existing deviations from the predictable generic arrangement of abstracts, the importance of raising genre awareness among EFL writers has been highlighted as a means to enhance the quality of published discourse.