Talent Development & Excellence 2100 Vol.12, No.1, 2020, 2100-2111 ISSN 1869-0459 (print)/ ISSN 1869-2885 (online) © 2020 International Research Association for Talent Development and Excellence http://www.iratde.com Assessing Complexity in the Introduction Part of Bachelor’s Theses: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Framework T. Thyrhaya Zein, T. Silvana Sinar * , Nurlela, Muhammad Yusuf English Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Sumatera Utara *Corresponding author: tengkusilvana@usu.ac.id Abstract It is possible to assess the complexity of text to determine the level of lexical density (LD) and grammatical intricacy (GI). This study seeks to discover how much complexity can be identified in the introduction part of bachelor’s theses. Qualitative analysis was utilized as the research design in this study. The words, phrases, and clauses were used as the data taken from the data sources of 20 introductions of the undergraduate theses in the English department of Universitas Sumatera Utara. The findings showed that the lexical density score is 53.54% and grammatical intricacy score is 2.542. The LD score obtained means that the characteristics of the written language used is suitable because the written text has a lexical density of more than 40%. Meanwhile, the grammatical intricacy shows that many clauses were used by students in writing the introduction of their thesis. This means that the students’ text were complex and more intricate. Keywords: text complexity, lexical density, grammatical intricacy, theses 1. Introduction One of the requirements for student in obtaining the bachelor degree in UniversitasSumatera Utara (USU) is by producing an academic writing called as thesis. This is acumpolsory for students since it is regarded as one of the determinants for measuringstudents’ succesfulness both in educational and research publications chasing (Nguyen &Edwards, 2015). For English literature students at USU, the thesis should be written inEnglish. This becomes more complicated since writing is an integrated skill and it needscomplex grammar to state the comprehensive ideas (Ma’mun, 2017).Bachelor’s theses commonly encompass a complex macrostructure(Zhang &Pramoolsook, 2019). Moreover, it can be used to judge the students’ proficiency levelthrough linguistic production realized in it (Lee, 2019) since the evaluation on language ispossible to conducted through the speaker or writer’s language use (Tobing et al., 2016).Linguistic realization in thesis is prominent since it affects the meaning conveyed (Syarif &Putri, 2018). The clearness of ideas expressed in the introduction part is crucial since it is thefoundation in developing the thesis. This part presents the background, the problem andquestion, the significance, the objective, and the scope of the study.One of frameworks to observe language is systemic functional linguistics (SFL)(Eggins, 2004). It has metafunctions covering ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and those are innate in every single language use (Sinar, 2007). SFL theory provides two types of text complexity named by Halliday (1985) as grammatical intricacy (henceforth GI) and lexical density (henceforth LD). He further defines LD as the number of lexical items (“content words”) per