The effect of genre-based mentoring on rhetorical quality of research article drafts by Indonesian lecturers in social sciences and humanities

Abstract

Indonesian scholars in social sciences and humanities are far behind scholars in sciences and engineering in international journal publication and their unfamiliarity with English rhetorical style has been blamed as the main cause. The purpose of this study is to improve the rhetorical quality of research article drafts written by Indonesian university lecturers in social sciences and humanities. Using genre-based method, a group of 20 lecturers were mentored to improve the rhetorical quality of their research article abstracts, introductions, methods and discussions and their drafts were evaluated following the frameworks suggested by Swales (1990 and 2004), Swales et al., (2009), Peacock (2011) and Lim (2006). The results show that the rhetorical quality of the lecturer's article drafts satisfactorily improved in terms of the rhetorical moves and steps, the way they justify their research project and the number of references they use in their drafts. This implies that genre-based mentoring is effective enough to improve the ability of lecturers in writing research articles to be published in reputable international journals.