At present, research papers are mostly published in English in order to make them accessible for wider international readers. Consequently, research article abstracts play an important role in drawing readers’ attention to the full research article. However, writing abstracts in English is not always an easy task for researchers who are not fluent in English such as in the context of the presenter’s university, RMUTL Tak. Therefore, a writing template with reliable language patterns and samples is needed for training staff, students and interested people to prepare their research abstracts in English. The purpose of the present study is to use a corpus-based approach to obtain information as guidelines for developing a writing template of research article abstracts. In the study, a corpus was compiled from abstracts in the fields of studies available in RMUTL Tak i.e. engineering, science, technology, business and liberal arts. The language analysis focused on 4 moves: objectives, methodology, results and conclusion. Then a concordance was used to create a frequency word list from the corpus, and a number of ‘research-related words’ were selected and used as keywords for studying and determining the language patterns used in each move. The results from the analysis were used to provide guidelines for preparing the writing template with ample of language samples.