Examining research spaces in doctoral prospectuses

Abstract: Genre analyses and contrastive rhetoric studies have dealt withquite a number of genres of writing. However, genre analysts and contrastiverhetoric researchers have not carried out adequate analyses of doctoral prospectuses.This paper will, subsequently, address this issue by analyzing agenre of texts of doctoral prospectuses. The analysis will be focused on thesub-genre of Background of the Study of the prospectuses. Limitations ofaccessibility, however, have led this study to only focus on analyzing fourteendoctoral prospectuses written in English by Indonesian students of EFLaccessible from the Graduate Program, State University of Malang, Indonesia.This situation suggests that the present study is preliminary. Preliminary,notwithstanding, the study will contribute to filling the gap of the underresearchedissue of doctoral studies in Indonesia, particularly, those pertinentto the area of ELT. The analysis shows a tendency that the texts of Backgroundof the Study do not show research spaces. Relevant to this, the articleprovides an interpretive explanation of the possible factors attributable tothis issue