Tenses Choice and Rhetorical Pattern of Unpublished Scientific Articles written by Non-Native English Speaker Student Teachers

Abstract

By employing the appropriate tenses, we communicate our feeling/intention appropriately. However, English tense is problematic for most EFL learners, even for upper-level students and for English teachers whose native language is tenseless. Non-native English speaker teachers (NNETs) as role models for English learners have an important role to succeed in the teaching and learning of English tenses. One way to know their English tense competence is by examining their unpublished scientific writing because academic writing demands a good feel of tense. This study aims at finding out the rhetorical patterns and tense shifts across rhetorical functions employed in the research article introductions (RAI) by NNESTs. This research is a qualitative study that embraces the characteristics of a case study, text/genre analysis. The data of this research are tenses and rhetorical functions collected from 8 unpublished research article introductions by NNESTs who were studying at the English Language Education Graduate Program, aiming at developing their quality. The data were analysed using Genre-Based Approach theory to reveal the rhetorical functions, rhetorical pattern, and tense shift. The research results revealed that most participants do not produce complete rhetorical stages. The most problematic rhetorical stage is the move 'indicating a gap'. The tense choice and tense shift in clause complexes are also problematic for them