The Discourse Structure and Linguistic Features of Research Article Abstracts in English by Indonesian Academics

To effectively teach university lecturers or students to write a good research article (RA) abstract for publication in international journals, instructors need to know the present characteristics of abstracts written published in such journals. This study examines the discourse structure and linguistic features of RA abstracts written in English by Indonesian academics published in national journals. The corpus for this study consists of 30 selected RA abstracts published mainly in university-based journals in Indonesia in social science and humanities disciplines. Analyses were conducted using genre-based procedures with a clause or a simple sentence as the smallest unit of analysis. The results show 1) unlike the common discourse structure of English abstracts found in RAs published in international journals, the majority English RA abstracts written by Indonesian speakers have only three moves (i.e. purpose, method and results); 2) the abstracts are mostly written in active sentence using present tense except for Move 3 (methods) in which a half of them are written in past tense and that-complement sentences are mostly found in Move 4 (results or findings); and 3) the use of interactional metadiscourse devices are dominated by hedges found in Move 4 while the use of attitudinal stance markers of the writers and self-reference words is rarely found in the abstracts.