Lexical Bundles in Indonesian and English Undergraduate Thesis Abstracts

摘要

The present study investigates Indonesian and English lexical bundles (LBs) used by Indonesian learners in their thesis abstracts. It aims to examine (1) the most common lexical bundles in the Indonesian and English undergraduate thesis abstracts, (2) similarities/differences in terms of form and functions, and (3) possible factors for the use of LBs in the students' abstracts. The data were obtained from a corpus of 140 abstracts written by Indonesian undergraduate students from Natural Science and Social Science disciplines in several universities in Indonesia. Results show that LBs with the phrases penelitian ini and this research dominate the abstracts. Based on the form, Indonesian and English LBs are mostly similar in the way that the same words are used repetitively from one language to the other, such as dalam penelitian ini, which often becomes in this research. Functionally, research-oriented and text-oriented LBs dominate the abstracts in both languages while the participant-oriented ones are the least frequent LBs. It is implied that the LB usage is influenced by students' knowledge of academic conventions, students' proficiency on the English LBs, and the differences of the languages themselves. There are some implications for teachers and students regarding the use of LBs in academic writing.