An Analysis of Thematic Development Pattern in Thesis Abstracts by Undergraduate English Education Students

This research aims to find the types and the most applied of thematic development patterns, also to describe students writing an abstract. This study was a descriptive qualitative design. The data of this research was abstract by undergraduate English education students of Bengkulu University academic year 2019 with a total of 20 abstracts. The data collection was the documentation on students’ thesis in 2019, while two undergraduate English education students to be respondents. The analysis of data was identification, coding, tabulation, interpretation, and conclusion. Then, a model of an analytical framework theory by Paltridge 2006 as the thematic progression in this study. The results showed there was Simple Linear Progression (SLP), Constant Theme Progression (CTP), and Split Rheme Progression (SRP) in the thesis abstract. Furthermore, the constant theme progression (CTP) was the most applied. The order of occurrence was a constant theme (69.4%), a simple linear theme (25%), and split rheme (5.6%). It is also found that the researchers are not able to study existing standard patterns, they just write based on the guidance from their lecturer. On the other hand, they writing an abstract without following other guidance such as a book that contains how to write a good abstract. It is concluded that the researcher is not independent in abstract writing. Moreover, this is because lecturers will decide and acceptable their abstracts.


Introduction
An abstract is one of the most important parts of a journal article because the determining abstract is continued or does not read the article as well as the abstract in a thesis. An abstract is an entry point for readers of the article, a Lifah, Syafrizal, Alamsyah An Analysis of Thematic Development Pattern in Thesis Abstracts by Undergraduate English Education Students 560 measuring instrument for the quality of articles to be published in a journal, and determinants of papers accepted or rejected at a seminar or conference. For example, when completing the study, students are required to publish their research articles from the thesis they wrote. As one of the important parts of the thesis, it is an abstract part. Abstracts written by students are generally written in the Indonesian language and then translated into the English language. That means that the Indonesian language must first be good to make it easier and more correctly translated in English (Arsyad and Arono, 2018). Because abstracts have a main role in the thesis, students must be able to do it write well-written abstracts.
Although abstracts are usually written most recently, abstracts are the first part that is read by readers after titles in academic writing, such as articles, theses, research reports, etc. to be read by the reader after the title. The abstract is located after the title and if the author did not write it correctly, interestingly, and precisely, the reader may not continue reading the article after reading the abstract (Belcher,

2009).
Numerous studies have been published that are using thematic development patterns in their analysis. Rakhman (2013) found when examining the paragraph writing of nine high school students at SMA Kartika Candra 3 Bandung exposition texts from the low, middle, and high level of achievement, she revealed that the applications of thematic development patterns to scientific texts have been carried out. The students organized their ideas in three ways of thematic development, including simple linear, constant theme, and derived theme.
In another researcher by Marfuaty (2015) about analyzing thematic development on the opinion section texts of The Jakarta Post also found that the texts used all the four thematic development patterns which are a simple linear, constant theme, and split rheme. She found that; First, the most dominant theme type is a topical theme (202 in total) as can be found in five texts. Following the position of the topical theme are the textual theme (49) in the second place and the interpersonal theme (25) in the last position. The findings of her study also reported that the highest occurrence of thematic development pattern is a simple Although most of the students at Bengkulu University have not known what theme-rheme and its organization is, abstract in a thesis that the students have written must have theme-rheme and also the pattern that is applied to connect these two terms. Besides, by analyzing thematic development in the thesis abstract by undergraduate, it can show the ability of students to organize their ideas and making their sentences coherent (Wang, 2007). By using the theory of thematic development pattern suggested by Paltridge (2006) as the framework, the study aimed to identify theme-rheme realization and to find out thematic development patterns mostly applied in the thesis abstract by undergraduate English education students of Bengkulu University.

Research Method
This research used descriptive qualitative research. So this research is not only limited to collect and arrange the data in good order but also analyzing and interpreting the meaning of the data. The researcher used a thematic development pattern theory that proposed by Paltridge (2006), since this study attempts to investigate the thematic progression patterns found in 20 thesis abstracts written by undergraduate students whose major is English Education at the University of Bengkulu to see how their ideas are constructed. The reason why the researcher chose the abstract is the corpus because it has one paragraph and normally already coherent.
The instruments of the research were the documentation and interview guidelines. In this research, the interview as a supporting instrument. According to Arikunto (1998), the function of interview is to judge some people's situations like to find out student background, parent, education, attention, and attitude. The purpose of using an interview was to find out how the student writes an abstract.
The researcher interviewed two students who are graduated in English education students of Bengkulu University academic year 2019. The interview question is consisting of five questions. The data were analyzed by the following steps :

An Analysis of Thematic Development Pattern in Thesis Abstracts by Undergraduate English Education Students
(1)Close-reading of undergraduate abstracts theses, (2) Breaking down the abstracts into clauses. (3) Placing the clauses into table format to make the process of the analysis easier and clearer, (4) Determining the theme and rheme, (5) Classifying the thematic development pattern, whether it is simple, constant, split, or derived hyper, (6) Calculating the occurrence of each type of thematic development patterns found in the abstracts, (7) Interpreting the findings to conclude how English students of Bengkulu University present their ideas in their abstracts.

Thematic Development Patterns in Thesis Abstracts
The first section concern with what thematic development patterns are in thesis abstracts. Theme 10 Rheme 10 Theme 11 Rheme 11 Theme 12 Rheme 12

How do the Researchers Write an Abstract?
Based on the interview session which was related to their thesis abstracts, There are five questions to know about how students write an abstract, the first question was: "How do you write a thesis abstract?", the second question was "Did you use the past thesis abstract as a reference?", the third question was "What is the guidance from the lecturer that helps you in writing an abstract?", the fourth question was "Did you read the guide to make a thesis abstract?", the last question Lifah, Syafrizal, Alamsyah

An Analysis of Thematic Development Pattern in Thesis Abstracts by Undergraduate English Education Students
was "What makes a good abstract?". All of the questions in the interview used English because the students from the English education department

Thematic Development in Thesis Abstract
In This probably caused is not appropriately in thesis writing, DTP is found frequently in expository texts (Rakhman, 2013). Moreover, the researchers do not use this pattern because they are difficult to apply using the theme as a topic to develop the next clause.

Thematic Development Pattern that Mostly Applied
The result has found that Constant Theme (CTP) with a total number of occurrence 50 (69,4%) is the type of thematic progression pattern that is mostly applied by the students in writing their abstracts. Eggins (2004) (2015)

How do the Researchers Write an Abstract?
The finding showed that how the undergraduate English education student of Bengkulu University academic year 2019 writing an abstract thesis, based on their experience, they were using past research as a reference, read the guidelines.
However, they agreed that guidance from their lecturer was very helpful. This Third, the researcher agreed that guidance from their lecturer was very helpful.
So, they writing an abstract based on the guidance from their lecturer. On the other hand, they writing an abstract without following other guidance such as a book that contains how to write a good abstract. It means that the researcher is not independent in abstract writing, does not choose to read the guide. Moreover, this is because lecturers will decide and acceptable their abstracts.

Suggestions
Based on the research results, the researcher would like to give some suggestions. For the teacher, this research is expected to provide a more detailed explanation about how to apply thematic development pattern appropriately so that in the future it can help students in writing a text. For the students, this research is expected to know the importance of using thematic development pattern in writing is to make the text coherent and easier to understand by the readers.
Besides knowing the types, students are also advised to understand how to use them appropriately.
For the researcher as a reference to the other researchers who want to conduct further research about thematic development patterns. Further research specifically dealing with thematic development progression should take another part of the thesis or they can also investigate the other writing text for example journals or articles. Hopefully, the future researcher will find other research questions and other ideas relating to English language teaching and learning processes. It would be better to repeat this study with a larger sample.