THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF UNDERGRADUATE THESIS ABSTRACTS BY ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDENTS: A COMPARATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS STUDY

Abstract is one of the important parts of an undergraduate thesis that contains the summary of the research. There are a lot of studies that investigate rhetorical moves, however there is no study that investigate rhetorical moves of undergraduate thesis abstracts from different universities. This research aimed to investigate the rhetorical moves of undergraduate thesis abstracts written by English education students of three public universities in Indonesia. This research used a comparative content analysis study. This research investigated 42 undergraduate thesis abstracts written by English education students from Universitas Bengkulu (UNIB), Universitas Negeri Padang (UNP), and Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) in 2021. The instrument of this research was observation checklist. The data were analyzed by using rhetorical moves’ framework of Swales and Feak (2009). The results showed that undergraduate thesis abstracts of English education students from those three public universities always wrote Move 2, Move 3, and Move 4 while Move 5 was still absent in some abstracts. Furthermore, English education students of UNP and UPI often wrote Move 1, while it was extremely hardly written by the English Education students of UNIB. In addition, there were differences of the rhetorical moves in undergraduate thesis abstracts among those universities in which the undergraduate thesis abstracts written by English education students of UNP and UPI had more complete rhetorical moves than the UNIB although some of the abstracts did not have Move 1 and Move 5. Thus, English students are suggested to include five rhetorical moves in their undergraduate thesis abstracts. Keywords: abstract, English students, rhetorical moves, undergraduate theses’ abstract