Comparing the use of idioms in academic writing steps used by Indonesian and native English writers

The background of this study is several studies highlighting unnatural or inaccurate academic English used by authors of the Indonesian language background. The issue here is how to help the authors to write more naturally, particularly in terms of academic writing steps (e.g., establishing background, stating aims, providing arguments, etc.). We argue that academic-writing-steps-related lexicogrammatical patterns and idioms from native English authors in Research Articles (RAs) can help. However, we need to first systematically identify differences in RAs written by native English and Indonesian authors, which is also the aim of this study. Methodologically, we replicate Prihantoro, Mudeng & Rahmah’s (forthcoming) procedure to identify academic writing steps (Morley 2014) and idioms in RAs written by Indonesian authors. We randomly sampled 30% of the articles concerning Prihantoro & Mudeng’s study. Our findings show that RAs written by native English authors are superior in frequency and quality of lexicogrammatical patterns and idioms. Our study here has at least two implications: 1) it confirms the observation of a number of second-language research scholars, and 2) we argue that the use of academic phrasebank, such as Morley’s (2014) and a number of idiom databases can help improve learner’s academic writing skills.