Textbooks have been considered to play a key role in the processes of education by researchers and educators, and the need to explore the language of textbooks has become increasingly recognized. However, although textbooks are an important learning tool, textbook language and composition have not been widely explored especially from textual perspectives. The purpose of the present study is to investigate text complexity progression in the reading texts of English textbooks published for senior high school students in Indonesia. The nature and rate of that progression are addressed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Being largely qualitative, this study examines three consecutive textbooks issued by the Ministry of Education, which are available online for classroom use. Data were collected and sampled from the reading texts found in the textbooks and were analyzed with regard to lexical density, lexical variation and grammatical intricacy in order to find the complexity of the texts. The results of the analyses show that regardless of the inconsistent progression of text complexity within each textbook, there is a consistent pattern of text complexity progression across grade levels. In other words, the lexical density, lexical variation and grammatical intricacy across the textbooks were found to have consistent progression from one grade level to another of which the direction is positive. It could be concluded that in general the language used in the texts becomes increasingly sophisticated, especially at lexical level, in accordance with grade level progression to cater for students' intellectual development.

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menelaah representasi identitas generasi milenial dalam caption Instagram aktor sosial generasi X. Penelitian ini mengaplikasikan Linguistik Sistemik Fungsional (LSF) yang digagas oleh M.A.K. Halliday Matthiessen (2014) sebagai kerangka ilmiah, terutama pengaplikasian konsep sistem transitivitas. Data berupa 10 caption Instagram yang berasal dari unggahan akun Instagram aktor sosial generasi X. Pengumpulan data menggunakan purposive sampling sehingga data yang dikumpulkan hanya yang sesuai dengan tujuan penelitian. Setiap caption dipisah berdasarkan klausa untuk mempermudah proses analisis transitivitas. Hasil penelitian ini mengungkapkan bahwa secara umum generasi milenial dikelompokkan sebagai anak muda yang memiliki jiwa entrepreneurship dan mampu memecahkan masalah. Mereka juga direpresentasikan sebagai agen perubahan dan generasi penerus yang cerdas dan kompetitif. Secara khusus, generasi milenial merupakan kelompok mahasiswa yang direpresentasikan sebagai generasi masa depan dan anak-anak yang kreatif. Identitas tersebut menunjukkan peran generasi milenial sebagai agent of change, social control, dan iron stock.

This study aims to investigate the attitudes towards translanguaging in EFL classrooms by 50 English language teachers. The present study employed quantitative descriptive. A survey was administered to the teachers to gauge information regarding the importance of translanguaging use and the frequency with which these teachers felt it was practiced in the classroom. The survey was collected through questionnaire that included multiple-choice and Likert scale questions. The findings revealed that Indonesian EFL teachers showed positive attitude towards the use of translanguaging in their classrooms. Most of them considered the incorporation of Indonesian language and local language are beneficial in EFL classrooms. It is also discovered that Indonesian EFL teachers were flexibly use translanguaging to facilitate students’ learning. Nonetheless, this study is limited to teachers’ attitudes. Hence, further study is needed to observe translanguaging practices in Indonesian EFL classrooms.

It is hard to select and produce appropriate semantic formulas of apologizing for paying off violation of social norms to restore harmony. It seems that it is even harder to realize such processes of selection and production in a non-native language. The study is of three folds; namely, it examines the realization of the apology strategies by students of a senior Boarding School in Arabic and English as a non-native language, the effects on the contextual factors (external vs. internal) on the students’ apologizing, and the pragmatic transfer. The participants were 101 male and 101 female students, recruited to fill in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which consisted of eight situations about the flouting of the politeness rules in the context of the Islamic boarding school, by drawing upon the five semantic formulas of apologizing from Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1983) of Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) for analyzing the data. The findings show that the students used identical semantic formulas in both languages. They prefer to use the “expression of regret” and “promise for forbearance” strategies. The findings also reveal that the internal and external factors affected the students’ selection and production of the apology strategies in both languages. In addition, the students’ pragmatic transfer occurred in linguistic areas, namely overgeneralization, inappropriateness, grammatical contrast, and conceptual transfer from L1 to L2, which are categorized into two types, namely, micro-negative transfer and macro-negative transfer. To conclude, these results indicate the students’ on-record-negative politeness attitudes towards the offended parties, which are determined by the contextual factors and the students’ lack of grammatical competence.

This paper explores the recontexualisation of issues surrounding NAPLAN test in the media through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics. In particular, this paper considers interpersonal meanings shared by journalists or media regarding the construal of NAPLAN test in Australian context. To obtain a comprehensive view regarding the construal, Appraisal analysis is deployed. Two different texts about a controversy of NAPLAN test in Australia are selected to be analysed: a hard news story and a comment piece. In addition to text analysis, an image accompanying the hard news story and a cartoon relating to the controversy of NAPLAN test are analysed to find out the realisation of meanings across two semiotic modes (texts and images). The results suggest that there are distinct patterns of realisation of evaluative meanings in these two texts. On the one hand, the hard news story tends to use indirect evaluation of either judgment or appreciation when dealing with the issue. On the other hand, evaluative meanings shared throughout the comment piece tend to be direct, negatively evaluating NAPLAN test and the educational system pertinent to the testing policy. In terms of text-image relations, results of analyses suggest that both texts and images orient readers to align with shared values regarding the construal of the controversial NAPLAN test in the Australian context.