Writing a quality research abstract is crucial for a scholarly report. An abstract should be informational and lexically dense, be formal, and have a professional tone. This requires precision, objectivity, logicality, technicality, and comprehensiveness. However, writing a good research abstract is a hurdle for novice and inexperienced undergraduate students who study English as a second language worldwide. This study investigated the research abstracts written by undergraduate medical students who also studied the English language at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana. A qualitative-quantitative approach, guided by Hyland's five-move model, was used to analyse the lexico-grammatical features in the rhetorical moves of the research abstracts written by these students. A corpus of 23 extracts representing a quota of sample tenses, hedges, boosters, and nominalisation was analysed. The data were coded manually and presented as frequency counts and percentages in tables and graphically. The results revealed that rhetorical moves in the research abstracts written by the students were filled with simple past, simple present, and perfect tenses, alongside lexico-grammatical devices such as hedges, boosters, and nominalisation to a greater or lesser extent. We conclude that the research abstracts follow Hyland's rhetorical five-move model, and comprise specific lexico-grammatical features. The pedagogical implications are discussed, and suggestions for future research are provided.