The Rhetorical Development Realizations of the ReadingTexts in the Senior High School English Textbooks

The study is an attempt to examine the rhetorical development realization of reading texts of the Senior High School (SHS) English textbooks. Based on the research problem, this study is aimed at finding out the various genres available in the textbooks for SHS students, describing how those texts achieve their respective social purposes, explaining how their respective rhetorical developments serve to achieve their respective social purposes, describing how the linguistic features serve to accomplish their respective social purposes, explaining how compatible those texts are with the 2006 English Curriculum (2006 EC). The method of the study is discourse analysis, and the approach is qualitative, however a simple quantification of the evidence in the form of percentage was done to support the finding. The data are all the reading texts provided in the six English textbooks published by six different publishers. They are the six out of fourteen publishers which are recommended by the Indonesian government to be used to teach English in the SHS. Two of the textbooks are for the tenth grade; two for the eleventh; and two for the twelfth. They are all a hundred and fifteen reading texts. The units of analysis consist of two kinds; a text and a clause. The former is for knowing the genre; it was done by segmenting the reading text into elements. The latter was done to find out how the elements of the text are realized based on the three strands of meanings that a clause can encode, the ones suggested by Halliday (1994). Those three meanings are: the interpersonal, textual, and the experiential meanings; however in this study the last meaning, the meaning of the text as representation is the priority since the texts analyzed were written ones. The results reveal that there are thirteen genres available in the textbooks analyzed; two of them, anecdote and commentary, are not required by 2006 EC. The distribution proportion among the genres is not balanced. Narrations are very dominant (20 %) and Procedures contribute the least constituent (1.7 %). Eleven out of a hundred and fifteen reading texts are problematic. This indicates that most of them have good rhetorical developments and realizations, therefore they achieve their respective social purposes and can be used as model texts. Three of the texts are problematic since the kinds of text suggested by the writer are incorrect. Their rhetorical development analyses prove that they should have been classified into other genres. In terms of the rhetorical development realization, ten out of eleven reading texts are problematic. Therefore they fail to achieve their social purposes. The following are the reasons : the clauses do not have MOOD for they have no subjects; some others use inappropriate time circumstances; the clauses do not make use of the thematization organization for the text to provide cohesion; the inappropriate use of minor clause is available in the text; and some clauses use inappropriate modals. The final conclusion is that most of the reading texts (90.43 %) are compatible with the 2006 EC There are four suggestions offered. First, the quantity of narratives in the textbook should be reduced and given to other genres that have less contribution, such as procedural texts, recounts, discussions. Second, the users of textbook should check the reading text that will be used as model texts for the students to work with, in terms of their rhetorical developments and realizations. Third, the textbook writer’s suggestion on the kind of text should not be taken for granted; some of them were proved to be incorrect. Fourth, the use of authentic texts should be done through a careful selection, especially on their quality