A Contrastive Analysis of Halliday’s Theme System in Indonesian and English-Native Abstracts

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the thematic features of research article abstracts written by Indonesian and English-Native speakers in language education and learning. With a huge interest in international publication among Indonesians, many go for a publication in academic journals that have a standard style of native English language. Thus, the lexical patterns of a manuscript must meet the criteria to make publication possible, otherwise the manuscript is not likely to be published. To capture this, 60 abstracts (from 30 Indonesian and 30 English-native authors) were chosen and taken from several international journals as the corpus of this study. Based on Halliday’s SFL model, the abstracts were qualitatively analyzed for their Textual meanings. The results indicate that themes of the abstracts are specifically manifested in the native abstracts that are distinguishable from the abstracts written by Indonesians. The findings of this study can yield benefits for teachers, students, and academics to improve their manuscript quality in advance of submission in leading and reputable journals.