Students' Identity Indicated by Genre Movement Used in Application Letters

摘要

As a first document used to assess someone's capacity, an application letter is required to be created in good genre moves to show someone's positive identity. This study analyzed the genre moves of students' application letters and investigated the students' identity portrayed in their texts. Using the SFL approach, this study analyzed four texts written by eleventh-grade students of a private school in West Java regions of Indonesia. The findings showed that the students' texts still weakly showed their positive identity since they did not cover all genre moves in their application letters. The students from the middle and high class used five of seven genre moves, while low-level students only used three of them. Although readers could still indicate that the documents belonged to application letters, the letters could not meet the purpose of an application letter since the text could not show the author's identity.