Lexico-grammatical Analysis of Native and Non-native Abstracts Based on Halliday's SFL Model.

The present study attempts to qualitatively investigate lexico-grammatical properties of academic journal abstracts written by both native and non-native speakers in educational psychology, based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistic (SFL) Model. To this end, 30 (15 native and 15 non-native) abstracts were selected and downloaded from two international journals as the corpus of the study. In order to determine lexico-grammatical features of both groups, the frequencies of three variables i.e. lexical density, adjuncts, and transitivity were compared and contrasted. The results showed that no significant difference was seen between native and non-native abstracts in terms of lexical density (59.72% and 59.91% respectively). Adjuncts were used more in the non-native abstracts than in native ones. Moreover, lexico-grammatical features of transitivity items (existential, verbal, behavioral, mental, material, and relational) in non-native abstracts were significantly more than the native ones. The findings of this study can be useful for EFL students as well as teachers to enhance the quality of their writings for presenting them in academic contexts and leading journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]