Claiming Importance of Research: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis on Indonesian Students’ Research Papers

Abstract

Research in universities has been deemed as a key aspect in showing rigor and accountability as well as the gatekeeper for academic quality. Research writing and publication, including those composed by students, are expected to provide strong and compelling applications of knowledge in their field. This present research investigated strategies used by students in claiming importance by way of presenting stance and arguments in their research writings. Corpus for this study was 1,178 student research abstracts from undergraduate student final papers in Indonesia. Two sub-corpora were built from this corpus, consisting of English version abstracts and Indonesian original abstracts. Corpus analysis was conducted to identify the lexical use and the context of the use of rhetorical markers by analyzing frequency, clusters, concordance, and collocations in the corpus. Using AntConc 4.2.4 as the tool for corpus analysis, the investigation was focused on the strategies in using hedges and boosters to present stance and arguments. Results of this study showed students used distinctive rhetorical markers in their abstracts, including the frequent recurrence of passive verbs (7 passive verbs out of 20 verbs). Results also showed the word “metode” (method) was frequently used (occurring 1,079 times in the Indonesian sub-corpus) in comparison to the word “hasil” (result) (occurring 588 times in the sub-corpus). Students also used more hedges (24 types) than boosters (17 types), contrary to common understanding. The findings of this study indicated the strategies students used to claim importance of their research. Students were also clearly aware of the value of writing as evidence of academic achievements and adherence. The conclusion for this study demonstrated the importance of providing students with alternative routes to show rigor and quality in writing. Implications for further research and for data-driven applications in writing courses were also discussed.