Rhetorical Move Analysis in Students’ Abstracts Across Degrees

Abstract

section of a thesis represents the whole text. It is the first thing that the readers will read and decides whether the readers will read the text as a whole or not. As a summary of the whole text, it is comprehensible that in writing abstracts, authors may put a lot of information compactly. Moreover, it is important to ensure that the abstract section is well delivered. Move analysis of an abstract can help authors to determine whether the abstracts accomplish necessary rhetorical actions. However, analysis of rhetorical moves of abstracts written in two languages is still scarce. Therefore, this study aims to investigate rhetorical moves patterns realized in abstracts of theses and dissertations in Indonesian and their translations in English. Hyland's (2000) five-move analysis model was used to analyze rhetorical moves patterns of 60 thesis and dissertation abstracts in social science taken from a university's online repository. This study reaches a conclusion that differences in education level may affect move and step realization in thesis or dissertation abstracts. From that point, authors should start to also include other moves such as introduction, purpose, and conclusion in their abstracts.

An Analysis of Rhetorical Move and Translation Techniques in Undergraduate Thesis Abstracts Written in Two Languages

“…On the other hand, the steps of Move 5 are all realized in low occurrences and are considered as optional, while step 3 is not realized at all in the data. This finding is in line with several past studies that analyzed step realization in students' abstracts (Juanda & Kurniawan, 2020;Putri et al, 2021). However, Pratiwi et al's (2021) findings in rhetorical move analysis of humanities and hard sciences' undergraduate thesis abstracts showed that step 3 of Move 3 is realized in a fairly low percentages.…”

“…The findings are in line with Rashidi & Meihami's (2018), who analyzed Scientometrics journal articles and discovered that method (Move 3) and results (Move 4) were provided the most frequently, while the information that was given the least in the abstracts was conclusion (Move 5). Furthermore, the results of this research show similar patterns with those presented by Juanda & Kurniawan (2020) and Putri et al (2021). However, Darabad's (2016) Darabad's (2016) study revealed that in three different disciplines (applied linguistics, applied mathematics, and applied chemistry), the least frequently occurring move was Move 1 -Introduction.…”