A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF SEVERAL THESIS ABSTRACTS BY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF UNIVERSITAS BENGKULU

ABSTRACT

The abstract in every research paper has always served as an attention-grabber, either encouraging readers to continue reading the research or discouraging them from doing so.This research is aimed to find the most dominant move and step of thesis abstract by undergraduate students and to identify any differences.This research used a mix method approach.The design of this research is descriptive, using quantitative as well as qualitative data.The data was taken from thirty undergraduate thesis abstracts of Education faculty from University of Bengkulu who graduated between 2019 to 2022.Hyland's five-move model will be used for research instrument.The result showed that, the majority and most dominant moves that found were Move 2 (purpose) 100%, followed by Move 3 (Method) 97%, Move 4 (Product) 97% and Move 5 (Conclusion) 80%, while the most dominant Step that found was Step 1 of Move 2 (Stating the purpose directly) 100%.Also, there is no significant differences of Move from the three study programs (English, Physic and Guidance and Counselling).Conclusion, most of the students were simply following the "Thesis Writing Guidelines" in writing their abstracts.Therefore, it would be better for the department in charge to revise the guidelines and use this research as a reference or guidance for a better abstract writing.

INTRODUCTION
An abstract is usually the first section of a report, article, or study in many scientific subjects.An abstract should clarify the subject of your article, the issue your study is attempting to address or the question you are attempting to answer, how you went about doing this, and the conclusions you came to.Its purpose is to sell your work.Writing an abstract is a crucial step towards publishing your study, so put in the time and effort necessary to write a thorough, polished abstract.Many people are unaware of the value of abstracts and the necessity of proficient abstract writing.
An abstract has a unique organizational structure and linguistic characteristics as one of the academic genres.The abstract provides a succinct and precise summary of the key points of the work or research.Background, purpose, method, outcome, and conclusion are common writing formats for the abstract's information.Additionally, the abstract should be no longer than one page and contain between 150 and 300 words.Additionally, the simple present, simple past, and present perfect tenses are frequently used in abstracts.Both the active voice and passive voice can be used to write those tenses.
The abstract also plays a number of significant roles.One of them is to give a piece of information's foundational knowledge.The abstract can also be seen as a persuasive rhetorical device that highlights the significance of the text.Additionally, the abstract can serve a crucial social purpose by enabling readers to observe how people attempt to place themselves within their societies (Hyland, as cited in Afful & Nartey, 2014, p. 93).
As a result, the research paper's abstract needs to be carefully written.When creating an abstract, there are a lot of crucial considerations to make.Cohesion is one of the components.According to academic writing manuals and ESP instructors, cohesiveness is one of the abstract aspects that must be taken into account in addition to clarity, conciseness, organization, and self-containedness, according to Chan and Foo (2001). (p. 13).Cohesion is a semantic relationship that creates connectedness between concepts in a text by using language strategies that are interdependent to form a text.Cohesion in this essay relates to how linguistic strategies are used to show how the pieces of an abstract work together.Cohesion is a crucial instrument for creating a text and its meaning as a result.The writer can create textual continuity that allows the reader to follow a text's logical or chronological progression by connecting linguistic elements utilizing cohesiveness.Therefore, it is important to understand how cohesive devices are used while developing abstracts.
Additionally, a crucial element that must be taken into account when creating an abstract is the rhetorical motion.A series of actions that define the discourse's flow are used to steer abstracts.The phrases "moves" and "steps" allude to the orderly division of each segment of the RAs, as used by Swales (as cited in Noguera, 2012, p. 68).(Research Articles).A section of the abstract is also referred to as a move.Each action conveys a distinct objective or goal that contributes to the text's overall communication goal (Swales, as cited by Oneplee, p. 13).In certain studies, the various abstract moves had been discussed.The three-move, four-move, five-move, and six-move were all covered in the investigations.

METHODS
Participants / Subject / Population and Sample (Level 2) This research uses a mixed methods approach.This study has a descriptive design and uses both quantitative and qualitative data.The qualitative data was shown in order to describe, explain, and illustrate the findings in depth, whilst the quantitative data was shown in order to indicate the percentage of occurrences.The approaches recommended by Hyland (2000) and the researcher's own intuition were used to identify communicative units in the abstract portion of undergraduate theses.The majority of the data results were explained in descriptive terms.The information was gathered, examined, determined, and debated.In the abstract section of the undergraduate thesis, the researcher focuses on the rhetorical devices or structures.
The corpus of this study consists of thirty undergraduate thesis abstracts written by students of the Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University.These thirty undergraduate theses consist of ten undergraduate theses each from three different study programs in the Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University (ten theses from the English Department Study Program; ten theses from the Guidance and Counseling study program; and ten theses from the Physics Education Study Program).The theses were chosen randomly from the latest graduates (who graduated in August 2019) of each study program.They were written in English.

Instruments
The research instrument is text analysis via a checklist of moves and steps in an undergraduate thesis abstract.In the checklist, the explanation of each move and step was put in a column, and each abstract had one checklist.The instruments will be attached in the appendix.Data Analysis Procedures Some steps were conducted in doing this research.Below is the explanation for each step.Here are some procedures in data analysis: First, the undergraduate theses were collected.There were thirty undergraduate theses in total, ten from each of the three different study Second, the researcher read the abstract section only.This is for the sake of understanding the abstract section of each thesis.
Third, the researcher carefully identified both the moves and steps from each abstract section.The processes of identification were carried out following the processes suggested by Hyland (2000).
Fourth, the researcher identified if there were any certain differences in the movements of the thesis abstract from each study program.
Fifth, validating the analysis results by including one independent rater in the process of analysing the text in order to validate the analysis results.One graduated student from the English Education Study Program was chosen to participate as the independent rater.The rater will be taught how to identify the moves that were found in the text with examples and also the analysis procedures as mentioned before.Next, she/he is given two weeks to do the analysis.She/he analysed 9 out of 30 undergraduate thesis abstracts (1/3) from the corpus of this study.If there is any difference of opinion or disagreement between us in analysing the moves in the abstract section, further discussion will be needed in order to find out the reason for the differences, so we will then come up with a better analysis result.
To increase the reliability or dependability, the researcher used Cohen's Kappa by Cohen (1960).Cohen's Kappa is a measure of the agreement between two raters who determine which category a finite number of subjects belong to, where agreement due to chance is factored out.The two raters either agree (i.e. the category that the subject is assigned to) or they disagree; there are no degrees of disagreement (i.e.no weightings).The table of strength agreement can be seen as below: Table 1

FINDINGS
Results of the undergraduate thesis abstracts move and step analysis From the results of the 30 theses abstract by undergraduate students in Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University, based on suggested by Hyland, there are Move 2, Move 3, Move 4 found in all thesis abstracts.Among the 30 thesis abstracts there are no Move 1 to be found at all, while Move 5 found in some.The dominant findings of the move and steps are at Step 1 of Move 2 which is Stating Purpose Directly.
Below is the analysis result of moves frequently used in thesis abstract by undergraduate students in educational faculty of University of Bengkulu: The result from Table 3 shows the frequency and percentage of moves found in thesis abstract by undergraduate students.As showed on the table, Move 1 is not found in any abstracts (0%), Move 2 is found in 30 abstracts, Move 3 is found in 29 abstracts (97%), Move 4 is found in 29 abstracts (97%), and Move 5 is found in 24 abstracts (80%).Clearly, the result showed that the 30 thesis abstract by undergraduate students of the three study programs frequently or dominantly used Move 2 (Purpose).
Table 3: Frequency of Move and Steps from each study program.
From result analysis of moves and steps of thesis abstracts from each study program, it can be concluded that there are no significant differences to be found.From all 30 undergraduate thesis abstracts, none are found to include Move 1: Introduction -0%, and the three steps that part of it.Almost all the abstracts from each three study program have the same pattern, which started by directly stated the aim or purpose of the research (Move 2: Purpose) -100%, while some others started by describing the type and method of the research (Move 3: Method) -97%, and by showing a brief result (Move 4: Product or Result) -97% and conclusion of the research (Move 5: Conclusion) -80%.Therefore, to answer the research question number 2, there are no significant differences of Moves and Steps of undergraduate thesis abstracts between the three study programs.The only notable differences are the steps in move 5.

DISCUSSION
The result showed that out of the five Moves, the most frequent or dominant moves that found were Move 2 Purpose (100% Obligatory), which found in all 30 undergraduate thesis abstracts (100%).Stating the purpose of the research is very important in writing an abstracts, especially thesis abstract.Move 1 (Introduction) were not found in any of the thirty abstracts.This occurred mostly because in writing thesis abstract, there is no competition at all.Students were not obliged to make their abstract interesting to read, unlike in research article where the researcher need to attract the reader into reading their article.Also, in case of this study, students mostly followed the "Thesis Writing Guidelines" which stated that in writing the abstract researcher must include the main or core purpose of the research, including a) Research Purpose, b) Methodology, c) Result of the study, d) Conclusion and Suggestion, as their guidance in writing the abstracts.this finding is in line with the findings of a research on the same field which entitled 'Rhetorical Moves of Abstracts: Investigating Abstracts Thesis of English Education Department Students in Surakarta' done by Karmila andMalikatul Laila (2020) following Hyland's (2000) five-model.Based on their finding, they found that the move 2 (purpose) was the most dominant which found in all 40 abstracts (100%), while move 1 (Introduction) is the least frequent with only 5% found in the abstracts and only have introduction in each of them.
This study also found that, the most frequent or dominant Step that found was Step 1 of Move 2 (stating the purpose directly), which found in all of the 30 abstracts (100%).The writing pattern from the 30 abstracts are mostly the same, which also mainly occurred because of following the "Thesis Writing Guidelines".
The result of this study also reveals that there are no significant differences from each study program, as most of the authors from each study program have the same pattern in writing their abstracts, which they start by directly stating their aim or purpose, next followed by either stating the type of the research or describing the method used for the research.the only significant difference that found was in Move 5 (Conclusion).Despite that Conclusion is clearly stated in the "Thesis Writing Guidelines", some students did not include it in their abstracts.It is either because students thought that it was not necessary or they were not just simply following the "Thesis Writing Guidelines", but also sample or following their senior or predecessors.This finding is pretty much in line with Arono's (2019) which entitled 'Abstract Thesis Analysis in Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching Fields'.Arono (2019) explains that the Move 1 (Introduction) and Move 5 (Conclusion) are not all in the abstract (move 1 with only 6.7% and move 5, with only 30%) in the optional classification.

CONCLUSIONS
Based on the results and discussion, there are some conclusions which can be drawn from this research, not all abstracts can follow the moves' structure according to Hyland's (2000) five-model of rhetorical Moves, from the five Moves, it is clear that in the 30 theses abstract by undergraduate student in Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University, it is found that Move 2 (purpose) was the most frequently found with 100% percentage.
Following the next findings, it concluded that the Step that is the most frequent found in thesis abstract by undergraduate students in Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University is Step 2 (Stating the purpose directly) with 100% percentage.It is also found that, each thesis abstracts from each study programs have no significant differences at all.Firstly, all of the thesis abstracts do not have Move 1 (Introduction).
And also, they all have the same pattern in writing the abstracts, they start by stating the aim or purpose of their research followed by describing the type or method of the research and vice versa, this pattern is mainly based on following the Thesis Writing Guidelines from The Education Faculty, which is stated that the abstract must contain the main or core purpose of the research, including a) Research Purpose, b) Methodology, c) Result of the study, d) Conclusion and Suggestion.

A
Comparative Study of Rhetorical Structure of Several Thesis Abstracts by… Wacana: Jurnal Penelitian Bahasa, Sastra & Pengajaran, Vol 21 No 1: 2023 | 21 programs from the Faculty of Education of Bengkulu University.The study programs are the English Department Study Program, the Indonesian Language and Literature Study Program, and the Guidance and Counselling Study Program.Each study program was chosen to represent three different fields: linguistic (English Education Study Program), science (Physic Education Study Program) and social (Guidance and Counselling Study Programs.The abstract that were collected was in range of last three years (from 2019 to 2022).

Table 2 :
Frequency of Moves in Thesis Abstract by undergraduate student