Developing Children Literature Through Genre Based Writing Class

Abstract

This research is conducted to increase literacy awareness. It is based on two primary concerns, namely: to improve the writing skills of English Department students of Universitas Dian Nuswantoro Semarang and to develop a model of suitable reading materials for Indonesian children that are learning English as a foreign language. In the English Department, the writing class employs a genre-based approach in which the teacher applies the teaching and learning cycles. According to Callaghan & Rothery (1988), the learning cycle consists of four stages namely building the context, modeling, joint construction, and independent construction. Five genres are taught, one of which is Narrative. The goal is specifically to enable students to create stories or books for children. Therefore, there are some guidelines that need to be followed to develop a narrative text, such as the generic structure, the linguistic features of a narrative text, and the personal value of children stories. The method of this research consists of class observation and students’ texts analysis. After the teacher and the students discussed examples of narrative texts, the teacher asked the students to create children stories with illustration in the form of a booklet. The result reveals that the students are able to create narrative texts that follow the generic structure and linguistic features appropriately, and they also present their texts in the booklet creatively.