Thematic Progression in Thesis Abstracts in Three Related Science Disciplines: Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching

Abstract

Current publication demands not only on academics, but also for students as candidates of professional staff, one of them is through a thesis. Theses which have been published in book form will later be compiled into a research article and published in journals, both online and printed. One of the important parts of the research article is the abstract. However, not all abstracts written by the students are in accordance with the right abstract systematically in a related field of science. In fact, abstracts are the main and important part in the description of the contents of a scientific work so that the readers become interested in continuing his reading. In addition, the writing of Indonesian abstracts is the basis for determining the writing in English. One of the tools for determining whether or not an abstract is a language tool is by using a systematic thematic progression pattern. This article aims to describe the thematic progression patterns with language tools in thesis abstracts from three related fields of science, namely linguistics, literature, and language teaching. This research method uses descriptive analysis with content analysis (Gay, 2009 and Arikunto, 2006:82; Ary at al, 2010). The data of this research was abstract in language teaching, linguistic, and literature 2017 with 10 abstracts each of them and totally 30 abstracts. The data was collected by using documentation on studetns’ thesis in 2017. The data was analyzed by using identification, coding, tabulation, interpretation, and conclusion. This thematic progression model using the Eggins 2004 models will be chosen as a theoretical analytical framework. The result of this research showed that thematic progression in the literature field was more variable, then followed by langage teaching and linguistics fields, while from 4 types of thematic progression, types of continous pattern was more dominnt (48%), zig zag pattern (30%), multiple pattern (16%), and tp with derived pattern (6%). It means that based on three fields showed that language teaching is more coherence in thematic progression since limited variation, then, followed by linguistic and literature fields. It can be concluded that type of thematics progression saw that type of continous pattern was more dominant. It means that abstract written in this theses was good enough.