A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON REPORTING VERBS IN RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS WRITTEN BY INDONESIAN AUTHORS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING PUBLISHED IN LOW-RANKING AND MEDIUM-RANKING JOURNALS

The study of reporting verbs (RVs) is rarely done by Indonesian scholars, and it is
hard to find the study of RVs in online literature. Therefore, this research aimed to
investigate how Indonesian writers used the RVs in research article introductions
published in low-ranking and medium-ranking ELT journals and investigating the
differences of the usage of RVs used by them in both groups of journals. This
research used a quantitative approach with a comparative design that investigated 40
research article introductions published in low-ranking (SINTA 6: Journal of English
Language Education, and SINTA 5: The Journal of English Literacy Education)
medium-ranking (SINTA 4: Journal of English Education and Teaching, and SINTA
3: ELT Forum: Journal of English Language Teaching) ELT journals in 2021. The
data were taken by using the purposive sampling technique and they were analyzed
by using the RVs’ framework of Francis et al. (1996). The results revealed that
Indonesian writers of low-ranking and medium-ranking ELT journals used all of the
RVs in research article introductions, but the most frequent RVs used by them was
―argue verb‖. Moreover, Indonesian writers of low-ranking ELT journals used more
―find and think verbs‖. Meanwhile, ―the argue and show verbs‖ were more often
used by Indonesian writers of medium-ranking ELT journals. These findings indicate
the importance of using the RVs in writing the research article introductions for
Indonesian writers’ in the field of English language teaching. The writers are
suggested to use more ―Argue Verbs, followed by ―Find and Shows Verbs‖ when
writing research article introductions.
Keywords: ELT journals, research article introduction, low-ranking journal, medium
journal, reporting verb