The Rhetorical Moves in Indonesian EFL Thesis Abstracts across Educational Levels

This study aims at investigating the rhetorical moves and steps of 24 undergraduate and graduate thesis abstracts. It mainly focuses on how the writers demonstrate the realization of linguistics yielding the conventional and standardized abstract writing convention. This corpus-based research utilizes the descriptive qualitative design. The result of this study reveals that most thesis abstracts have accommodated five moves. Interestingly, five out of eight abstracts written by students with low- level GPA come complete five moves, but only three out of five written by high-leveled GPA students present the complete five moves. In addition, several overlapping steps occur in the moves of the ab- stracts regardless of their GPA level.