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Helena I. R. Agustien
Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES)
Introduction
1
A plenary paper presented at UPI national seminar, 27 February 2006.
writing purposes. That is probably why Taylor (1988) says that the word
“competence” has been widely used and abused. Therefore, when people
use the term at all, it is important that the definition be provided so that
the readers know exactly whether it is competence in Chomskyan sense
(psycholinguistic tradition) or competence in pedagogical sense (socio-
cultural). Taylor (1988) also suggests that Chomsky is mainly concerned
with tacit knowledge, or “ready state”, or “attained state” and not with
how that state is attained. Since pedagogy is about how to attain a
particular state of language ability, a model of competence which is
pedagogically motivated is used as the basis of developing the 2004
curriculum. That model is the one developed by Celce-Murcia et al.
(1995).
Bringing discourse into the picture, teachers need to come to term with
discourse. Discourse is something abstract that comes into being through
texts. For example, we have been involved, in one way or another, in a
discourse called Tsunami. How did the discourse emerge? How has it been
sustained? Is it dying out? When the December tsunami attacked, people
in the world talked and wrote about it. People tried to communicate to
obtain news, to express condolences, to offer help and so on. These acts
of communication are communicative events; the events that occurred
with purposes; the events that happened in contexts.
Thus far, our discussion has clarified several issues: why the 2004 English
curriculum is competence-based, what language / communicative
competence is, why text is central in the curriculum, and what literacy
levels are set for junior and senior high school levels. In the following
section we are looking at how a text-based curriculum is implemented
through a genre approach.
Independen
t
Teacher Learning Peer
Zone Intervention
Intervention
Interactive
Discourse
To implement the 2004 English curriculum the two cycles and four
stages recommended are represented in the following diagram:
Diagram 2: Cycles and Stages of Learning (Hammond et al. 1992:17)
After listening, students enter the third stage called Joint Construction
of Text (JCT). At this stage they try to develop spoken texts with their
peers and with the help from the teachers. They can create different
announcements, conversations on showing how to do things,
monologues on how to make something and so on. They need to
demonstrate their speaking ability and to show confidence to speak.
Feeze and Joyce (2002) also suggests a fifth stage that can be applied
in foreign language contexts especially if there are bright students in
the class or those who are “born writers” who are able to link related
texts together. The pulling together different genres or texts to create
a new larger text relates us to the concept of intertextuality which
refers to “the web of texts against which each new text is placed or
places itself, explicitly or implicitly” (Bazerman 1994:20). Knowledge
on intertextuality can help students understand how genres change,
developed and are transformed for new contexts and purposes
(Hayland 2004:81). Citing Crowston and Williams, Hayland presents
some facts that among “48 different internet genres, classifies by their
purposes, from a random sample of 1,000 web pages,… 60 percent
were directly reproduced from familiar paper formats and another 30
percent simply added technical changes. Therefore we can say that
genre evolution does happen, but it happens slowly. This is the reason
why this fifth stage is optional in foreign language and high school
contexts. If the situation does permit, the learning stages can be
extended to cover the fifth stage.
Good Luck!
Bibliography