A Discourse Analysis of Online Library Resources: A Study of Students’ Projects abstract

Abstract

Many students in tertiary institutions have not followed the normal structure of writing their projects’ abstracts. Despite lecturers' efforts to supervise students in order for them to follow projects’ writing rules, there are disparities in the patterns of writing project abstracts by undergraduate students in Nigeria. This study investigates online abstract from students’ projects submitted in partial fulfillment for the award of first degrees in Nigeria universities. It adopts Hyland’s (2000) and Swales and Feak’s (2009) Models of Move Analysis. The study also adopts a qualitative research design; with data collected at random from colleges with online abstracts of undergraduates’ projects stored in the library on-line institutional repository. Findings reveal that universities in Nigeria has no agreed patterns of abstract structure for students’ project; none of the projects has complete macro and micro patterns of abstract, and none has the concluding part of a standard abstract. The study concludes that Nigeria University students' abstract writing does not meet the acceptable global standard. However, universities should organize a project writing workshop with a greater emphasis on how to write an acceptable abstract.