CONJUNCTIONS IN INDONESIAN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS ABSTRACTS
Downloads
This study investigates how conjunctions are used for organizing ideas in abstracts of linguistics and literature theses written by undergraduate students of English Department in an Indonesian university. It also reveals the similarities in the ways conjunctions being used in the abstracts. It employs descriptive qualitative design to examine 82 abstracts which have been collected from 41 linguistics and 41 literature theses. The abstracts are analyzed by classifying and calculating the use of conjunctions using conjunctions taxonomy proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The study finds that six abstracts do not apply conjunctions. While the rest use the three types of conjunctions: elaboration, extension, and enhancement. Elaborating conjunctions are used appropriately, whereas extending and enhancing conjunctions are partly inappropriately. Two kinds of inappropriate uses of conjunctions are misuse and overuse. The use of conjunctions in abstracts of linguistics and literature theses is quite similar in the ways they are used and total number of their uses. Certain conjunctions are present in the abstracts, while the others are inexistent. Both kinds of abstracts mostly use extending conjunctions, more especially positive additives. It can be concluded that the use of conjunctions varies in terms of their appropriateness. Inappropriate uses of conjunctions evince that EFL (English as a foreign language) learners had difficulty in using conjunctions in their writing. The students whose abstracts do not apply conjunctions connected the ideas in their abstracts using words and/or phrases which are excluded in the theoretical framework of this study. More similarities than differences in the ways conjunctions being used in the two kinds of abstracts prove that students from the same department of study had the same discourses.
Afful, J. B. A., & Nartey, M. (2014). Cohesion in the abstracts of undergraduate dissertations: An intra-disciplinary study in a Ghanaian university. Journal of ELT and Applied Linguistics (JELTAL), 2(1): 93-108.
Bailey, S. (2011). Academic writing: A handbook for international students (3rd ed.). London and New York: Routledge.
Cheng, F. (2014). Cohesive devices in English abstracts of MA theses by Chinese and occidental writers [Abstract]. Retrieved August 5, 2015, from http://www.globethesis.com/?t=2235330398968809
Fraenkel J. R., Wallen N. E., & Hyun H. H. (2012). How to design and evaluate research in education (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday's Introduction to functional grammar (4th ed.). Oxon: Routledge.
Hamed, M. (2014). Conjunctions in argumentative writing of Libyan tertiary students. Canadian Center of Science and Education, 7(3): 108-120.
Jeon, B., & Eun, H. (2007). A contrastive rhetoric of doctoral dissertation abstracts written by American writers and Korean writers. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 15(3), 161-188.
Ketabi, S., & Jamalvand, A. A. (2012). A corpus-based study of conjunction devices in English international law texts and its Farsi translation. International Journal of Linguistics, 4(4), 362-371.
McMillan, J. H. (2008). Educational research: Fundamentals for the consumer (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.
Mertens, D. M. (2010). Research and evaluation in education psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Paltridge, B. (2000). Making sense of discourse analysis. Queensland: Gold Coast.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (1994). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Zhang, M. (2000). Cohesive features in the expository writing of undergraduates in two Chinese universities. RELC Journal, 31(1), 61-95.
1. Copyright of this journal is possession of Editorial Board and Journal Manager, by the knowledge of author, whilst the moral right of the publication belongs to the author.
2. Legal formal aspect of journal publication accessibility refers to Creative Commons Atribusi-Non Commercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA),implies that publication can be used for non-commercial purposes in its original form.
3. Every publications (printed/electronic) are open access for educational purposes, research, and library. Other that the aims mentioned above, editorial board is not responsible for copyright violation.