WRITING NARRATIVE AND ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION GENRES BY
MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS AT SAINT THOMAS 1 MEDAN
A Thesis
Submitted to Post-Graduate School English Applied Linguistic Program in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora
BY: LIM A SUI
Registration Number : 8126111018
ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY PROGRAM
POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
WRITING NARRATIVE AND ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION GENRES BY
MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS AT SAINT THOMAS 1 MEDAN
A Thesis
Submitted to Post-Graduate School English Applied Linguistic Program in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Magister Humaniora
BY: LIM A SUI
Registration Number : 8126111018
ENGLISH APPLIED LINGUISTICS STUDY PROGRAM
POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL
A Sui Lim, Registration Number : 8126111018, Writing Narrative and Analytical Exposition Genres by Male and Female Students at Saint Thomas 1 Medan, English Applied Linguistics Study Program , Postgraduate School, State University of Medan, 2014
ABSTRACT
A Sui Lim, Nomor Induk Mahasiswa : 8126111018, Menulis Karangan Narative dan Eksposisi oleh murid pria dan wanita Santo Thomas 1 Medan , Program Kajian Linguistik Bahasa Inggris Terapan, Pasca Sarjana, Universitas Negeri Medan, 2014
ABSTRAK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
A major research project like this is never the work of anyone alone. but the support of many people. The contributions of many different people, in their different ways, have made this possible. I would like to extend my appreciation especially to the following. Thank God for the wisdom and perseverance that he has been bestowed upon me during this research project, and indeed, throughout my life: "I can do everything through Him who gives me strength." (Philippians 4: 13).
First and foremost my first debt of gratitude must go to my first and second advisers, Prof. Amrin Saragih PhD, and Dr. Sri Minda Murni M.S, who have given your patience and immense knowledge, support, guidance, useful comments, advice throughout this research project. Both of you have been tremendous mentors for me. I would like to thank you for encouraging and allowing me to grow as a research scientist . Indeed, without your guidance, I would not be able to put the topic together. You have been strong and supportive advisors to me throughout my graduate school career, but you have always given me great freedom to pursue independent work. I attribute the level of my Masters degree to your encouragement and effort and without you this thesis, too, would not have been completed.
Special thanks to my committee, Prof. Dr. Busmin Gurning, M.Pd, Prof. Dr. Lince Sihombing, M.Pd and Dr. Syahron Lubis, M.A for your support, guidance and helpful suggestions. Your guidance have served me well and I owe you my heartfelt appreciation. I also want to thank you for letting my defense be an enjoyable moment, and for your brilliant comments and suggestions, thanks to you.
Special thanks also to all her graduate friends, and most importantly, I would like to thank my boyfriend, Subono Hutagalung who has given his support, encouragement, quiet patience and unwavering love and his invaluable assistance. Not forgetting to Mr.Farid Ma’ruf who has always been willing to make friendship and assistance has meant more to me than I could ever express.
CHAPTER IV DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS, AND DISCUSSION
DATA ANALYSIS ... 45
4.1 Different Competencies of Male and Female Students ... 45
4.2 The Individual Writing Competency Backgrounds (Interest, Motivation Ability to Produce Words, and Quickness to Write) Affect Male and Female Students at Saint Thomas1 to Write Narrative and Analytical Exposition Genres ... 48
4.3 The Reasons For Saint Thomas1 Male and Female Students’ Writing Competencies Can Be Different ... 53
FINDINGS ... 56
DISCUSSIONS ... 59
CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS ... 62
5.1 Conclusions ... 62
5.2 Suggestions ... 63
REFERENCES ... 69
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Background of the Study
Writing plays an important role not only in the success of learning process but also in the daily life. The development of language skills affects a person‟s productive ability.Foong (1999) claims that learning to write is important and useful for language and rhetorical practice for communication, and as a discovery as well as cognitive process. Several researchers have demonstrated personal success in disciplines is strongly related to a person‟s writing ability (Lerstrom,
1990) and depends on good writing skills (Cho & Schunn, 2007). This is also realized by the decision maker of education in Indonesia. Therefore, the government of Indonesia, the department of education in particular, nowadays pays more special attention in the development of writing skill than they used to.
Among the four language skills taught in schools, writing is the most difficult skill to learn. It needs specialized skills that include the ability to express the writer‟s opinions or thoughts clearly and efficiently. These abilities can be
achieved only if a learner masters some techniques of writing such as how to obtain ideas about what s/he will write on, how to express them in a sequence of sentences, how to organize them chronologically and coherently, and how to review and then to revise the composition until the writing is well-built (Ratnasari, 2004).
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reference to teach English. The aim of English teaching and learning process in High School is to enable the learners to reach the functional level, i.e. to communicate in both spoken and written form. In relation to written communication, writing becomes the important skill to be mastered.
For years, the researcher has practiced teaching English at Saint Thomas 1 in Medan. It is a private Roman Catholic high school educating male and female students in the Catholic tradition of youth formation. Most of them come from Bataknese and Chinese tribes. Normally, they are highly motivated to learn any subject at school including English. For grade XII students, they are taught by three teachers. One teacher teaches written skill, another teaches oral skill in the class and the other teacher coming from the Philppines teaches oral skill in a language lab.Some of them are active in extracurricular activities. One of them is English club. It‟s no wonder, some of them are ESL learners.
Anyway, through researcher‟s teaching experience as an English teacher there, she senses there is a gap between male and female students to achieve basic and standard writing competencies. She finds that male and female students in classrooms learn in gender-specific ways. She is always finding some difficulties in teaching male students writing subject. She always finds that female students write better than male students in English writing.
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essay. In other words, they lack ideas. Evidence from a preliminary study showed that the major aspects of the students‟ weaknesses in their writing were lack of ideas and poor ability to organize them. These difficulties lead them to lose motivation in writing.
Research that describes the differential performance of boys and girls has drawn on what might be considered stereotypical notions of gender as well as on features of the learning context. For example, from psychological view, writing is viewed as a passive, reflective act that is incompatible with the stereotyping of boy as being more active than girls.
Then, David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri says,”when males listened, only the left hemispheres of their brains were activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. "If there's more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined.
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also inspire them. On the other hand, instrumental motivation acknowledges the role that external influences and incentives play in strengthening the learners' desire to achieve. Learners who are instrumentally motivated are interested in learning the language for a particular purpose. Learners' attitudes, motivations,
and goals can explain why some writers perform better than others
.
As Millard (2001, p. 1) states, the difference between primary school boys‟ and girls‟ writing attitudes becomes apparent at an early stage: even boys
who are skilful writers do not find school writing interesting.
Having a positive attitude toward the language and culture and toward learning a foreign language is an important contributor to the success of foreign language learning. A positive attitude might spur learners to interact with native speakers, which in turn increases the amount of input that learners receive. A positive attitude often leads learners to use a variety of learning strategies that can facilitate skill development in language learning. A positive attitude brings out greater overall effort on the part of language learners and typically results in greater success in terms of global language proficiency and competence in specific language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. A positive attitude also helps learners maintain their language skills after classroom instruction is over (Gardner, 1985).
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to his or her pupils‟ interests when planning writing exercises. A pupil finds
exercises that are connected to his or her interests meaningful. Pupils can feel that they are „„experts‟‟ when writing about their own hobbies, whereas this is not the
case when the topic of the writing task is unfamiliar
However, if students show an overall interest in the target language (integrative motivation), perceive that there is parental and social support, and have a desire to achieve their professional goals (instrumental motivation), they can become more proficient in their ability to write in English, despite the initial lack of self-motivation.
Recent studies highlight a long-held suspicion about the brains of males and females. They're not the same, so how does the brain of a female look and function differently from a male's brain, and what accounts for these differences?
According to Dingwall (1998) males and females tend to function differently in their brains. He concluded that language function may be more organized in females.
Scientists now know that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the fetus. A recent study by Israeli researchers that examined male and female brains found distinct differences in the developing fetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy. The disparities could be seen when using an ultrasound scanner.
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Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. "Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain," says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-12-year-old boy.
Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys.
The following are some of the characteristics of girls' brains:
A girl's corpus callosum (the connecting bundle of tissues between hemispheres) is, on average, larger than a boy's—up to 25 percent larger by adolescence. This enables more “cross talk” between hemispheres in the female
brain.
Girls have in general, stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys have. These connectors lead to more sensually detailed memory storage, better listening skills, and better discrimination among the various tones of voice. This leads, among other things, to greater use of detail in writing assignments.
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Female students performed significantly better than male students in terms of content, organization, grammar, and diction. Still, it was beyond the scope of the current study to draw a concrete conclusion on gender differences in English writing performance Kann (2001)
Therefore, from her teaching experiences and psychological, science, and social theories above have made her realize that as a teacher she has never been aware of the differences how female and male students learn writing. This also makes her curious to know more about what are the different writing competencies between her male and female students if they are analyzed based on Systematic Functional Linguistics like the social function, generic structure and the lexico-grammatical features. She analyzed her students‟essays based on SFL because the English teaching curriculum in Indonesia stated by Ministry of National Education has been concerned with communicative competence of the students. In turn, in high school level, the students are targeted to be able to communicate through spoken and written language appropriately (Depdiknas, 2003). Concerning the communicative competence through written mode, the national curriculum prescribes that the writing competence to be achieved by the high school students is not determined by the number of words that the students can produce but more on the quality of the writing they produce (Depdiknas, 2003). In addition, by analyzing the students‟ essays based on SFL it enabled her
to analyze her students‟ writing competency to write essays based on
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analysis shows whether students have capability to convey their ideational, textual and interpersonal meanings through written context.
As far as the researcher knows, normally writing teachers analyze
students‟ writing competency based on only five aspects: content is weighed 30
points, language use is 25 points, organization and vocabulary are weighed 20 points, and mechanics is weighed 5 points, but SFL genre approach analysis is more effective and that students benefit more in aspects of content development and rhetorical organization than in such domains as linguistic accuracy and lexical diversity.
Then, the researcher also would like to find out how the students‟ individual writing backgrounds affect their writing competencies and whether there are still other factors making male students weak in writing subject.
In order to get the findings, the researcher gets her students to write analytical exposition as a representation of informational genre as well as non fiction and narrative genre as representation of fiction.”, she does this because in Getting going: generating, shaping and developing ideas in writing (DCSF, April 2008,14 ), Professor Richard Andrews says, techniques for improving writing will include practice in writing, not only of literary and fictional genres but also in informational and argumentative genres.
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1.2. The Research Questions
In relation to the background of the study, the problems are formulated as the following.
(1) What different competencies do male and female students at Saint Thomas 1 Medan have to write narrative and analytical exposition genres?
(2) How do the individual writing backgrounds (interest, confidence, following writing processes and abilities to produce words) affect male and female students at Saint Thomas 1 to write narrative and analytical exposition genres? (2) Why can Saint Thomas1 male and female students‟ writing competencies be
different?
1.3. The Objectives of the Study
With reference to the research questions, the objectives of the study are: (1) to describe the different competencies of male and female students‟ narrative
and exposition genres (based on social function, generic structures and linguistic realization of narrative and exposition genres),
(2) to elaborate how the male and female students understand the social function, generic structures, and linguistic realization for both genres, and
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1.4 The Significance of the Study
Theoretically, the significance of this study is to give contribution to development of linguistic studies especially for writing studies about some insight of possible obstacles faced by students in writing narrative and exposition genres.
For practical significance, hopefully, the findings of this research can be used as a reference in the process of teaching writing to the students. Furthermore, EFL Language teachers could use the results as diagnostic information to provide appropriate assistances toward different gender to facilitate learning. EFL Language teachers could further understand students‟ weaknesses and help solve
their learning problems.
Then, the research findings also provides insights into Saint Thomas 1 students‟ responses either to the approach and the effect on learning out
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CHAPTER V
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
5.1.1 Conclusions
After analyzing the data, conclusions are drawn as the following:
(1) Female students at Saint Thomas 1 did better for the narrative and analytical exposition genres analyzed based on generic structure, and lexico grammatical. For narrative genre, male students only did better for the generic structure. However, for the analytical exposition either for generic structure or lexico grammatical features, female students did much better than male students for over all. For the social function of both genres, both female and male students didn’t have different competencies at all.
(2) High interest, confidence, abilities to produce words, and to write quickly apparently affected their writing competency. Male students did worse than female students because they had less interest. For individual confidence, the researcher could sense that there were 72.7% male students who didn’t follow
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(3) The reasons for their different competencies are: Male students had never been motivated by their own parents to write better and given English literature books to read. They had worse attitude towards writing subject. This might happen because they experienced worse method of teaching for writing subject from their writing teachers than female students. On the other hand, female students could achieve that stage because they had ever been supported by their parents to be professional writers. Some of them were ever provided with books concerning with literature like English novels and they also had high interest in learning writing and they were taught more grammar before
that’s why they know more linguistic skill and these also changed their
attitude towards writing.
5.2 Suggestions
In relation to the conclusion, suggestion are stated as the following:
(1) a) The teachers’ methods of teaching for writing subject should be improved
especially for teaching linguistic skill. Teachers may not teach their students grammar separately from contextualizes writing with inappropriate use of interventions, misuses of writing work and criticism of failure of school. However, the following is a list of selected teaching practices by Charles Whitaker, Ph.D. that are well recognized in the profession as being effective in helping students develop as writers. Establish a positive atmosphere for writing
It is important in teaching writing for teachers to create a positive environment for writing, an atmosphere of mutual respect, positive regard, safety.
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adolescents, engaging students’ senses and emotions, for example, through a
colorful room, artwork, and music, is a way to hold students’ attention and make
them feel comfortable. Encouraging students to talk with each other and allowing them to move occasionally from their seats to participate in an appropriate task or project can help, especially with middle school students Respect for and among students Essential for a positive environment is respect for students, their ideas, emotions, cultural backgrounds, interests, concerns, etc. This respect is modeled by the teacher in a variety of ways and is expected in the interactions of students. Teacher as writer
Ideally, writing teachers are practicing writers. By sharing their writing— particularly when it’s in draft form—teachers model respect for themselves, for their students, and for the act of writing itself. They communicate that they are part of the writing community in the classroom and in the world at large and that they feel safe sharing this part of themselves Organize for writing.
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effective. Teachers might, for example, decide to use a multi genre approach or an approach based on immersion in literature.
Arrange for meaningful-to-students reasons to write.
Teachers must think carefully about the approach they will use to arrange for students to write for meaningful purposes. True, it may not be easy to determine what will engage all students, and, true, some students are reluctant to write, but teachers should strive to “invite writing” to improve the odds that all students will be engaged and interested in writing. Reading and talking about a variety of genres are important practices, and a variety of other practices can stem from this reading. Teachers can help students develop as writers by encouraging students to apply the techniques and characteristics of materials they read. Teachers can construct mini-lessons drawing on reading materials, and they can ask students to identify in the reading material important features they can apply in their own writing
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explicitly, so that they develop facilities in producing them and become familiar with variant features. If one is going to write in a genre, it is very helpful to have read in that genre first.
(2) a) Listening to music while writing can make us write with more words. Listening to music facilitates the recall of information. Researchers have shown that certain types of music are a great "keys" for recalling memories. Information learned while listening to a particular song can often be recalled simply by "playing" the songs mentally. Music becomes stimulus for students who try to express themselves by writings (Brown &Brown, 1997 and Donland, 1976). b) We should follow writing processes in order to get better result like: planning, drafting, evaluating and revising.
(3) a) Parents’ supports are very important for students who are still in the process
of learning .Students’ attitudes towards writing should be guided all the time by
their teachers. Their families particularly their parents should always support them. Parents should let their children know that one of the most important academic skill a child can acquire is writing. Being able to write well and concisely can help a person to succeed, both academically and in the job market. And as with other subjects learned in school, writing skills can be improved when integrated into a child's home life.
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such as well-written sentences and paragraphs, which they can use as a guide to
improve the children’s quality of writing. Help support the efforts of your child’s
teachers at home by using a writing process chart. The writing process involves a few simple steps that are used as a guide for creating well-developed writing skills. In other words, the writing process ensures that the writer expresses what he/she means to articulate by helping the writer avoid senseless errors
Teachers and parents should provide students literary books to read because literary books help students a lot. Good literature exposes children to correct sentence patterns, standard story structures, and varied word usage. Students can improve their English with the interesting context, and all children benefit from new vocabulary that is woven into the stories. Then, we do not learn to be great writers just by writing, but by studying the writings of greater and more experienced writers than ourselves. The more great writing the students read and the more intensely they will interact with it, the more your own writing will improve.
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Francis Ltd. Li, Y. H. 2004. Gender differences in conversational styles among senior high school students in Taiwan. Unpublished master’s thesis, Fu -Jen Catholic University, Taiwan
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