The Empirical Study on Humanities Graduate Students' Abstract in Academic Writing

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K13090
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02090:Japanese language education-related
• Research Institution: Edogawa University (2021-2023); Waseda University (2020)
• Principal Investigator: MITANI Ayaka 江戸川大学, 国際交流センター, 講師 (20831960)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 論文要旨 / 文章構造 / 文段 / アカデミック・ライティング / 評価調査

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study aims to propose a method for writing abstracts for research papers in the humanities. It involves: (1) an analysis of the “discourse type” of abstracts in research papers on Japanese language education and Japanese linguistics, (2) an investigation of abstract written by graduate students, and (3) an evaluation survey of different types of abstracts based on their distribution of bundan (“grammatico - semantic paragraphs”).
An abstract must include bundan for both the “research purpose” and the “conclusion”, and should be structured in a final unifying type, where the conclusion as thesis paragraph. Based on the amount of “communicative units” in each bundan, there are four types of distribution. Evaluation survey revealed that abstracts in the “summary type” and “conclusion detailing type” received higher ratings than those in the “background and purpose detailing type” and “method detailing type”.

Free Research Field

日本語教育学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究の意義は、人文学分野の日本語の研究論文の要旨の作成方法を、①学会誌掲載の論文の分析、②大学院生が作成した論文要旨と作成過程に関するインタビューの分析、③論文要旨の評価調査から多角的かつ実証的に解明しようとした点にある。本研究により、論文要旨の表現特性はもちろん、大学院生の論文要旨の作成に関する実態も明らかにすることが出来た。