A. Toyyibah, A. Effendi Kadarisman
Expressing religiousness is part of Indonesian socio-cultural norms. Religion-related expressions are often produced by Indonesian people in any occasions: formal and informal, spoken and written. This "divine presence" is also found in research report acknowledgments by Indonesian learners of English. This article explores religion-related expressions in acknowledgements accompanying 120 undergraduate and graduate theses and 23 doctorate dissertations. This corpus-based study found that most acknowledgements contain religion-related expressions in the forms of (1) thanking God, (2) prayers for blessing on the Prophet, (3) spiritual support as a reason for thanking, and (4) invocation for the acknowledgees as elaboration of thanking. Another typical aspect of Indonesian acknoweldgements is the preferred order of acknowledgees, where most writers put thanking God at the initial position. Besides confirming that acknowledgements reflect socio-cultural identities of the writers and revealing an Indonesian variety of English, this study provides evidence of pragmatic transfer among Indonesian EFL learners.
ELT Department, State College for Islamic Study (STAIN), Kediri, Indonesia; State University of Malang, Indonesia
