Marketization Strategy in Research Article Introductions by Indonesian Authors in English Language Education Journals

Writers should attract readers’ attention to read their work from the very beginning of their article; this can be done by addressing a centrality claim (henceforth CC). However, very few studies examining research article introductions (henceforth RAI) examined further how authors attract readers to the importance of the research topic. This study aimed at investigating the types of CCs used in the RAIs published in local journals in English Language Education (henceforth ELE) with different Sinta values. Forty articles were chosen from four national accredited journals in LE for this study. The results showed that the most frequent appeals found in the RAIs are appeals to salience followed by appeals to problematicity and appeals to magnitude. This is reasonable because a piece of research should be on an important topic, because of a practical problem on a popular topic to attract readers to read the entire article. Also, although the difference is not significant the higher the Sinta value of a journal the higher the frequency of different appeals used by the authors in the introduction of the articles published in the journal. This suggests that to improve the attractiveness of an article, authors should use several different types of appeals in their RAIs.