Experiential Metafunctions in Junior High School Students’ Descriptive Texts: An SFL Transitivity Perspective

Abstract

This study investigates the experiential metafunction realized in seventh-grade students' descriptive texts based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The primary objective is to identify transitivity choices and explain how early EFL learners construct experiential meanings from a unified developmental perspective. This research employed a qualitative descriptive design. The participants were 30 seventh-grade students at State Islamic Junior High School in Medan, selected through cluster and purposive sampling across three classes. Data were gathered through a controlled descriptive writing task about classrooms and houses, producing a corpus of 315 clauses. The clauses were analyzed using the interactive qualitative model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2014), categorizing transitivity elements into process types, participants, and circumstances. The findings revealed that relational processes dominated the texts (50.5%), followed by existential (35.2%), mental (6.3%), material (5.4%), and behavioral processes (2.5%), with no verbal processes identified. This transitivity profile demonstrates that students intuitively comprehend the register demands of descriptive texts by deploying static, attributive, and existential configurations. However, the heavy reliance on formulaic copular constructions reflects interlanguage constraints and first-language (L1) transfer from Indonesian syntax. These results underscore the need for explicit SFL-based genre scaffolding to enrich clause-level variety in early EFL writing instruction.