What Communicative Functions to Begin Writing a Research Article Abstract in the Applied Linguistics Discipline?

Cek Turnitin

Abstract

Studies on abstract sections within research articles have received various scholars' attention, but none has investigated how to begin writing research article abstracts. To respond to this fundamental issue, this study intends to analyze how to begin writing research article abstracts in the applied linguistics discipline published in reputable journals because it may contribute to adding some more insights to the literature about the ways to write research article abstracts. Data in this study were research article abstracts published in the last five years. Several earlier analytical approaches were employed to analyze data in the present study. The results revealed that authors used two communicative functions to begin their research article abstracts: claiming centrality and presenting purposes. However, authors prefer employing claiming centrality rather than presenting purposes. Language signals used to indicate communicative functions are also analyzed and discussed in the body of this paper. Besides, sentence forms and syntactic choices to realize communicative functions are also discussed in the discussion section.