An analysis of Rhetorical Structure and Grammatical Errors Made by English Department Students in Writing Research Proposal Introduction at Islamic University of Indragiri

Many novice proposal writers do not realize that what is written in their proposal is a reflection of what will be produced. A careless designed and written proposal will result in questionable findings and make the readers difficult to understand of what the writers mean in their proposal writing. This paper aims at revealing the rhetorical structure and grammatical problems found on students‟ research proposal introduction. The guidance in investigating the students‟ rhetorical structure is the five stages of introduction proposed by Weissberg and Buker, there are five stages that will be discussed and to find out the grammatical problem, the theory proposed by Dulay et al is used. This is a qdescriptive qualitative research. The sample is 18 documents or students proposal introduction. The data for rhetorical structure is taken by using coding sheet note, and while for grammatical problem is taken by using syntax and morphological taxonomy. In general, the findings show that the students still have problem in writing research proposal introduction based on the rhetorical structure. The problems found on the stage I,II,III. Stage I is identified too general, the statement about the field of study is not closely related to the actual research problem. The aspect already studied (stage II) were not stated by the students in their proposal introduction. Problem is also found on the stage III. The statement about a gap on the research and the need for more investigation were not stated in the proposal. Based on the five stage, these stages must be put in the introduction section. The grammatical problems found in the students proposal introduction such as the wrong use of tense, the wrong use of verb “be”, misspell, word order, preposition, article, and plural ending (s).