Voice Used in Conclusion Texts Written by Indonesian Polytechnic Students

Abstract

Conclusion text is the ending part of an academic report. The students of Accounting Department of Semarang State Polytechnic have to accomplish final report to graduate. Many studies found that not only students but also teachers had problem in academic writing. This paper describes the use of passive and active voices in the conclusion texts. The data were 16 units of conclusion taken from the students’ final projects. The analysis steps were reading thoroughly the texts to acknowledge the clauses. The clauses of each text were identified and numbered, then were identified whether they belonged to active voice, passive voice or none of the two mentioned. It was known that texts in this research mostly used active voice and finite verbs. Passive voice was used in lower frequency. Almost all the passive and active clauses were well structured, the passive and active constructions were applied correctly but there were some clauses which were uncommon in English usage. Therefore, vast examples of conclusion texts should be  provided to the students.

Keywords: conclusion text, active voice, passive voice