RESEARCH GAP STRATEGIES IN MASTER THESES OF ENGLISH EDUCATION POSTGRADUATE PROGRAM OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BENGKULU

A research gap could be defined as unanswered problems or questions by the existing
research in various fields. It may exist because of the new idea which has not occurred
before, or when the current available research is in need to be updated. Research gap
has such an important role for researcher in order to justify the current research being
conducted position. This descriptive analysis research aims at finding research gap
strategies used by master students of English Language Education Postgraduate
Program of the University of Bengkulu and how they presented the research gap
strategies on their theses. The method applied in this research was mix-method. This
research involved thirty master‘s student theses that have been completed and
distributed in 2019 to 2021 as corpus of study. The first result showed that five among
six research gap strategies were used and strategy 2 or stressing insufficient was the
most frequent strategy used, this may be because the writers ought to justify their
research based on the limitations of similar studies which already conducted before. It
was also found that strategy 4 (contrasting conflicting previous research) is not used in
the theses being analyzed. The second result indicated that a single research strategy
dominantly used by Master students of English Language Education Program of the
University of Bengkulu in presenting their research gap. These phenomena might be
influenced by students‘ ability and might be due to the thesis writing guidelines, as
well as the lack of synchronization of supervisors in the supervision process. The
result of this study most likely imply that research gap strategies need to be learned
explicitly; at the first semester the students could be provided with research gap or
niche establishment training, or it is being emphasized in certain subject, for example
in academic writing
Key words: Research Gap Strategies, Academic Writing, Master Theses, Introduction
Section, Literature Review Section