A Genre Analysis of Textbook Discourse

-- A Case Study of A Travel Journal from Unit 3 Book 3 for Senior High by People’s Education Press

Abstract

As one of the suggestions on teaching specified in New Curriculum Standard is studying the texts thoroughly and grasping the core teaching content. As part of the curriculum content, text types which fulfil specific social purposes are used to specify what students should be able to achieve with language if they are to meet the stated outcomes of the syllabus. When texts share the same general purpose in the culture, they will often share the same obligatory and optional structural elements and so they belong to the same genre or text type. Then it's much easier to produce an appropriate text when you know its structure, and for this reason awareness of text types is now part of the curriculum. This study, selecting the reading material for senior high school students: A Travel Journal from Unit 3 Book 3 published by People’s Education Press, analyzing the structural elements in this text based on Martin’s genre analysis in the Sydney School, concludes that, to facilitate the cultivation of students’ core literacy, teachers are advised to try to answer three fundamental questions of “what, why and how” during text analysis and teaching design, which are consistent with field, tenor and mode from Halliday’s (1978) Register Theory respectively and can be answered by considering the genre and three meta-functions of language including ideational, interpersonal and textual, which is achieved by transitivity system, voice, polarity; mood, modality system; theme-rheme structure, information structure and textual cohesion.