Abstract

Texts available in the school textbooks serve as linguistic models, media to cultivate values and norms in society and also the source of knowledge. Systemic Functional Linguistic (Halliday, 1994) sees text as the construction of a social system as well as the cultural context where it is produced, realized through genre. This paper attempts to compare the genre of the reading texts in both Indonesian and English textbooks, used in primary school by using the theory of SFL. According to Martin (1992), Genre can be divided into two: 1) the factual genre; genre produced by reality, and 2) fiction; genre produced by imagination. The aim of this study is to describe the types of genre of the reading texts available in school textbooks and to explains how the experiential function is realized through the transitivity analysis. The comparison between the two school language textbooks is interesting because it involves two different cultures. This research is a qualitative descriptive study. This study use the Bahasa I ndonesia textbook published by Penerbit Yudhistira 2010) and the English textbook ‘My Pals are Here English’ published by Marshall Cavendish Education (2003), both are for grade 3. The textbooks are used as handbooks by several international schools in Denpasar. It is found that the dominant genre both in the Indonesian language textbook and the English textbook is factual genre, more specifically the genre of reckon There are also more explanation genre in the Bahasa Indonesia textbook. In terms of the transitivity analysis, both books mostly use material process. However, for the participants and circumstances, the Indonesian textbook mostly uses children as participants and the places around the children’s life such as school and home. The English textbook has more variations of participants and circumstance which includes several professions and fictional characters and it also presents more variety of places. Keywords: SFL, textbooks, genre, transitivity, children texts

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