INFORMALITY IN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS ACADEMIC WRITING: A DIACHRONIC CORPUS STUDY OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT THESES ABSTRACTS AT UNIVERSITAS AIRLANGGA

An abstract of an academic writing is required to be formal; however, there are some abstracts that use informality features. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of the eleven informality features proposed by Chang and Swales (1999) and Hyland and Jiang (2017) in foreign language writings. This study is a diachronic corpus study. The writer collected the data from English Department theses abstracts from the year of 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. The data were tagged using Claws7 tagset and informality features were retrieved from Antconc. The data which cannot be retrieved from Antconc are analyzed manually. The study showed English Department theses abstracts at Universitas Airlangga contained eight types of informality features such as first-person pronouns, second-person pronoun, sentence-initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs, sentence-final preposition, run-on sentences and run-on expressions, sentence fragments, contraction, and direct question. From those nine informality features, four of them constantly have appeared over time. The correlations of the year and normalized number of those four informality features were respectively: first-person pronouns (-0.64), sentence-initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs (-0.85), run-on sentences and run on expressions (-0.74), and sentence fragments (-0.89). These show that each of the informality features has decreased. A decrease in each of the informality features indicates that English Department students’ academic writing becomes more formal