CARVING OUT A NICHE: RHETORICAL MOVES AND RESEARCH GAPS IN INTRODUCTIONS BY INDONESIAN UNDERGRADUATE ELT STUDENTS

Abstract

Indonesian journals increasingly publish articles by undergraduate students, yet little is known about how these novice writers build introductions in articles that have passed editorial review. This study analysed 24 introductions written by undergraduate students and published in 2025 in an Indonesian national journal of English Language Teaching (ELT). It combined qualitative genre analysis based on Swales’ Create a Research Space (CARS) model with descriptive statistics. Two coders identified the moves, the types of research gap, and the sequences of moves, and resolved disagreements through discussion. Moves 1 and 3 appeared in all introductions (100%), whereas Move 2 appeared in 22 of the 24 (91.7%). Among the 22 introductions that stated a gap, population and context gaps were the most common (50.0%), followed by technology and media integration gaps (31.8%) and methodological and genre gaps (18.2%). No writer used counter-claiming, and every gap was framed as an absence of research. Twenty-two introductions followed the standard sequence of Move 1, Move 2, and Move 3, and two moved directly from Move 1 to Move 3. The writers controlled the overall structure, and their difficulty lay in the range of strategies used to establish a niche. The omissions were few and should be read cautiously. The findings suggest that academic writing instruction could give explicit attention to gap statements and to evaluative strategies. Because the corpus came from one journal and year, the results cannot be generalized.