ABSTRACT Ishak, Cita Nuary. 2014. Directives in Academic Writing: A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study of C-SMILE and COCA. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisors: (I) Prof. Dr. YazidBasthomi, M.A. and (II) Prof. Hj. UtamiWidiati, M.A., Ph.D. Keywords: reader engagement, directives, C-SMILE, COCA, bald-on-record FTA Academic discourse is a social construct (Swales et al. 1998), where maintaining personal engagement with readers is considered highly crucial (Hyland, 2002c). Successful academic writing therefore requires a clear awareness of and appropriate engagement with readers (Hyland, 2001). Among five elements to engagement proposed by Hyland (2005b), this present study focuses on directives. Directives are of special interest because while they function to bring readers into texts, they are categorized as bald-on-record face threatening act (Brown and Levinson, 1987) which potentially prejudice the ongoing writer-reader relationship in written academic discourses. Due to this nature of directives, they seem to be neglected by literature (Hyland, 2002b; Swales et al. 1998) and consequently, little is known about how the roles of directives in scholarly writings. This present research attempts to take this neglected yet critical area by exploring the use of directives in academic writings from two different corpora. This research investigates the use of directives in academic writings written in English by non-native and native English. The research data are academic writings in the humanities taken from the corpus of EFL writings, C-SMILE, and the corpus of academic articles written by native English, COCA. Forms of directives studied in this research follows Hyland’s (2002b) model of directives; they are imperatives, necessity modals, and predicative adjectives controlling a complement to-clause. Reader pronouns categorized by Kim and Thompson (2010) is combined with the necessity modals in order to find the accurate data from both corpora. Taking a contrastive corpus-based study, this research compares the quantitative results obtained from C-SMILE and COCA, qualitatively analyzes the similarities and differences spotted in the two corpora, and discusses some emerging issues from these findings. This research finds that both the EFL undergraduate students and the native authors of journal articles engage their readers through the use of imperative see. The similarity found is in the use of textual imperative see as the most prevalent directives in both Indonesian and American corpus. However, taking a microscopic look to this phenomenon, a number of differences are found. While see functions to refer to both internal and external resources in COCA, in C-SMILE it only refers to internal resources. Not only that, see in COCA interpolates writers’ evaluation of and attitude toward the works it refers to and this is what absent in C-SMILE. C-SMILE and COCA is similar in the way that we dominates the reader pronouns, but distinct in the necessity modals following the pronoun. The emerging issues arise from these findings are (1) the problem of lack of resources faced by the EFL undergraduates, (2) the imperative see that loses its ‘threatening’ potential in academic culture, and (3) the possible explanations behind the overuse of see and the underuse of other imperatives. Finally, this research touches upon the pedagogical suggestions for the problems regarding the lack of resources faced by the EFL undergraduates, the overuse of see, and the underuse of other forms of directives in the Indonesian corpus. One of the suggestions is dedicated for EFL lecturers to teach the importance of engaging readers into texts.
