An Analysis of Ideational Meaning on Explanation Texts in Indonesian Senior High School Students in ESL Writing: A Study of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

SFL is useful for contributions to the field of education, especially in language teaching. It can enhance teachers’ creativity in the learning process. In addition, SFL can also stimulate children’s critical thinking and reading analysis. In this way, children can be slowly taught to analyse the relationships, meaning, content, and purpose of texts and contexts. This research analyzes the ideational meaning of explanation texts written by Indonesian Senior High School students in ESL writing. The objectives of this study are: 1) to know the process types used in explanation text written by Indonesian Senior High School students in ESL Writing, 2) to know the dominant process of the type used in explanation text written by Indonesian Senior high school students in ESL Writing, and 3) to find out the contribution or pedagogical implication of Ideational Meaning analysis in the writing process. The researcher employed qualitative descriptive as the research design. The data were taken and collected through documents collection from students’ worksheets. The documents were collected from eleventh-grade students in Senior High School in Bandung. The result showed that the process types used in explanation text written by Indonesian Senior High School students in ESL Writing are material, mental, attribute, identifying, and existential. The identifying process is the dominant process found in explanation texts that occurs 21 times (31,81%) in the written text by Indonesian Senior High School students in ESL Writing. The ideational meaning embodied in the students’ explanation text shows that students present their work in a state of being and doing through material, mental, attribute, identifying, existential processes, and circumstances to support their writing. In improving students’ writing skills, teachers can use a genre-based approach. It can be concluded that students mostly used relational processes to give their idea about the phenomenon/ event discussed in their explanation texts. Finally, the writer suggests that the teacher master ideational meaning and explain more about the lexico-grammatical feature used in explanation text so that the students can produce a good text in ESL Writing.

Keywords: Explanation Text; Ideational Meaning; Transitivity; SFL