Students’ Problems in Personal Letter Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

The 2013 English curriculum for high school demands students to write a personal letter in English to improve their writing ability. However, some students met some difficulties in writing a personal letter. This study investigated the students' problems in writing a personal letter based on three metafunctions in the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective. A qualitative case study was employed to analyze the use of three metafunctions of fifteen students of senior high school in writing personal letters. The results of the study reveal that the students' major problems in producing personal letters were the disappearance of one aspect of interpersonal metafunction namely subject and finite, resulting in incomplete clauses and sentences to deliver the idea completely. Other results show that students tended to use the same verb that refers to mental processes on experiential metafunction that only described the writer's point of view, causing the self-focused personal letters whereas personal letter is aimed to strengthen the relationship between writer and reader. The study recommends that the teaching of interpersonal metafunction in terms of subject and finite, and the various expressions of processes need to be explicitly delivered. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 148Responding to the recent gap, this paper tries to identify writers' specific linguistic resources in communicating a particular message in personal letter writing based on the