The competence of EFL teachers in mastering genre based texts

Abstract

This study aimed to find out the junior high school English teach-ers' competence in mastering genre-based texts. The study was conducted to 13 English teachers of Junior High Schools in the districts of Kahayan Hilir, Maliku, and Jabiren Raya in Pulang Pisau Regency. The data were obtained from test and questionnnaire. The result of the test shows that the teachers' mastery in all genre-based texts was at the 'fair' level with 65.38. The aver-age score in each genre varied with 79.23 (good) for recount text; 68.46 (fair) for procedural text; 65.77 (fair) for descriptive text; 64.23 (poor) for narrative text; and 46.54 (very poor) for report text. Meanwhile, the result of the ques-tionnaire revealed that there was no training for teachers on genre-based texts. The finding of this study reccommends the need of training in master-ing genre based texts for Junior High School teachers for better students' achievement in mastering genre-based text and for better preparation for National Examination. School-based curriculum or Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pendidikan (KTSP) was estab-lished in 2006 and focuses on developing stu-dents' competence on knowledge, skill, and attitude. This curriculum is the result of im-provement in the competence-based curricu-lum of Kurikulum Berbasis Kompetensi (KBK) which has been put into Law No. 22 Year 2006 on list of Standard of Content Law, No. 23 Year 2006 on list of Standard of Graduate Competence and Law No. 24 Year 2006 on the Implementation of Standard of Content and Standard of Graduate Competence in Curric-ulum. Therefore, this 'improved' curriculum requires schools to develop their curriculum based on the Standard of Content and Stan-dard of the Graduate Competence (Permen Diknas No. 24, ayat 2: 2006). The change of school curriculum has brought a consequence to the English teach-ers' quality. The teaching of English at school according to Kurikulum Tingkat Satuan Pen-didikan (KTSP) or School Level Based-Cur-riculum is to put English into meaningful contexts and communicative functions. The School Level-Based Curriculum is an opera-tional curriculum which is arranged and done by each education unit. To reach this goal, the focus of the teaching has shifted from forms to meanings and language functions. Conse-quently, to enable the students to acquire this skill, the teaching must cover both language components (e.g. grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation) and language skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing. One of the efforts in improving the teach-ing of English in Indonesia is at the approach within the implementation of curriculum. The Competence-Based Curriculum recom-mended the Genre-Based Approach (Agus-tien, 2006). It is an approach used to conduct the classroom activity in the process of teach-ing and learning based on genre and focuses on the understanding and production of se-lected genres of texts. This approach has be-come popular since the 1980s along with the notion that student writers could benefit from studying different types texts (Halliday, et