THE RHETORICAL STYLE OF DISCUSSION SECTION OF RESEARCH ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN HIGH-IMPACT REPUTABLE JOURNALS BY INDONESIAN AUTHORS IN DIFFERENT FIELDS

The thesis aims to describe the rhetorical style of discussion session in 30
research articles (RAs) of six different fields of study, written by Indonesian
authors and successfully published in highly reputable journals. The fields
comprised computer science, language, chemistry, engineering, social
sciences and physics. This study used a qualitative method. One of the used
instruments was a table containing eight main communicative units in the
discussion sessions found by Swales. However, the analysis focus was
limited to Move 1 to Move 6. Data formed numbers and percentages
indicating the amount of stages involved in all of the chosen RAs. Data
were also in the form of extracts (authors‟ arguments) which showed the
moves applied in their articles. The results exhibited that there was a varied
use of rhetorical style on each RAs, but Move 5 was used in all selected
RAs (100%) which proved that the discussion section required a profound
elaboration of the obtained research results and Move 6 was the least to be
used with a total of 9 (8.2%). The total numbers of moves applied in all of
RAs were 109, in which 2 articles in engineering and 2 others in computer
science did not apply Move 4 and Move 6. Meanwhile, Move 2 was not
presented in RAs of physics. Six moves were barely applied in 1 article in
social sciences, but there were also 3 articles (10%) in engineering that only
applied 3 moves. The findings proved that the rhetorical style in the content
of articles published in high-reputation journals were diverse, so as
producing acceptable RAs for being published in high-reputation journals
does not necessitate to involve all moves. Nevertheless, Move 5 must be
presented in each of RAs to explain the results of research. There are the
differences in terms of rethorical structure in the discussion section of
research articles of six different field journal.
Keywords: rhetorical structure, discussion section, research article