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’
abstracts