Transitivity Analysis in EFL Academic Writing: A Systemic Functional Study of a Third-Semester Learner's Expository Essay

Abstract

This study examined the transitivity processes realized in an expository essay written by a third-semester English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner, aiming to identify the dominant process types, describe their distribution across Halliday's six transitivity categories, and interpret what this distribution reveals about the learner's capacity for objective academic writing. Using a qualitative discourse analysis design grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), one final-project expository essay produced by a third-semester student at an English Education Study Program in Indonesia was purposively selected and segmented into clauses through a documentation technique; the 26 resulting clauses were coded using a researcher-developed instrument based on Halliday's transitivity framework and analyzed descriptively through frequency and percentage calculations. Results showed that the behavioural process was the most dominant, accounting for 53.8% of clauses, followed by the relational process (42.4%, combining attributive and identifying types) and a marginal mental process (3.8%); material, verbal, and existential processes did not occur. Phenomenon was the most frequent participant role (22.9%), and place was the most frequent circumstantial element (42.9%). These findings indicate that the learner's writing leaned toward subjective, reaction-based framing rather than the objective, fact-oriented stance expected in expository writing, suggesting an underdeveloped command of genre-appropriate linguistic resources. The study underscores the value of transitivity analysis for diagnosing EFL learners' academic writing development and highlights the need for genre-based instruction attending explicitly to process-type choices.