This contribution explores rhetorical features in 207 abstracts submitted for four international conferences in Yaounde (Cameroon), Regensburg (Germany) and Birmingham (UK). Relevant text features are retrieved from the corpus via concordance software and results are discussed in the light of their frequency of occurrence. Furthermore, the abstracts are manually scanned to determine recurrent schematic patterns. Findings show that rhetorical choices and recurrent "moves" in the abstracts submitted for the Regensburg-Birmingham conferences are more attuned to the expectations of community discourse practices than those of the Yaounde-Cameroon conferences.