53 

 EEJ 4 (1) (2014) 
  

English Education Journal 
  

http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/eej 

 

 

APPRAISAL IN THE JAKARTA POST ARTICLES ON NATIONAL EXAMINATION  

 

Mohamad Wigunadi   

 

Prodi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Program Pascasarjana, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia 

 

Info Artikel 
________________ 
Sejarah Artikel: 

Diterima Oktober 2014 

Disetujui Oktober 2014 

Dipublikasikan 

Juni 2014 

________________ 
Keywords: 

Appraisal system, 

attitude, affect, 

judgement, appreciation, 

amplification, source of 

attitude, article texts, 

ideology 

____________________ 

Abstract
 

___________________________________________________________________ 
This study is about appraisals which were used to evaluate the interpersonal meanings found in 

the article texts published in The Jakarta Post newspaper.It is  aimed to answer mainly questions: 

what appraisals are used in the article texts? and  what is the ideology of the of the article texts? 

The research design of this study is qualitative descriptive. Qualitative method is intended to 

unmask the text under analysis, while descriptive method is meant to describe the realization 

interpersonal meanings by using appraisal system as introduced by Martin and Rose (2003).The 

analysis was based on the system of appraisals which devided into three sub-systems: systems of 

affect,appreciation, and judgement.The analysis showed that the writers of the texts applied all of 

the apprpraisal devices (systems of affect, judgement, appreciation, system of amplification, the 

source of attitudes system, taxis and logico-semantic relation system) including the addressees of 

the appraisals, and the ideolgy of the texts. While the results of the analysis based on the 

appraisals devices indicated that most of the evaluation fell on the negative categories. Moreover, 

based on the ideological analysis, the writer of the texts seemed to refuse the implementation of 

national examination as the topic under analysis. 

 

 

© 2014 Universitas Negeri Semarang 

 
 Alamat korespondensi:  

   Kampus Unnes Bendan Ngisor, Semarang, 50233 

   E-mail: pps@unnes.ac.id 

ISSN 2087-0108  

 



 

Mohamad Wigunadi / English Education Journal 4 (1) (2014) 

 

54 

 

INTRODUCTION 

 

National examinations for the students of 

senior and junior high schools have attracted our 

attention of any levels such as government, 

legislator, and those who directly involved in this 

field like teachers, students’ parents, and the 

students themselves.  

To know people ideas about the issue, the 

reaseacher chose some article texts from The 

Jakarta Post newspaper (range from the year 2002 

to 2011) because this newspaper has strong 

contribution to influence the opinion of the society. 

Appraisals as a particular approach to 

explore, describe and explain the way language is 

used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct 

textual personas and to manage interpersonal 

positioning and relationship (White 2001:1). 

Appraisal systems introduced by Martin and 

Rose (2003) gives possibilities to examine texts 

more detail and accurate based on the linguistic 

evidences. We may have better understanding 

about what has been spoken or written by people, 

how they feel and give evaluations and judgements 

directly or implied. 

Model of language is a theory of language in 

context, and suggests that language can only be 

understood in relation to the context in which it is 

used (Hammond et al 1992: 1). Thus different 

purposes for using language and different context 

result in different language texts. The construction 

of language texts in turn impacts on the context. 

There is thus a two-way relationship between text 

and context. 

Language is used in a context of situation as 

well as a context of culture.As Hammond et al 

(1992: 2) explain that Halliday (1978) suggests 

that there are three variables within any context of 

situation that largely determine the language 

choices that are made in the construction of any 

language text. These variables function together 

and are responsible for the configuration of 

language features found in any text. This 

configuration of language features constitutes the 

Registerwhich consists offield, tenor and mode.  

People use language to do communication 

and negotiate their ideas and thought. Matthiessen 

(1995: 1) says that language is a resource for 

making and expressing meanings relating to 

various aspects of social system. Halliday and 

Hasan (1976: 1) assert that a text in linguistics 

refers to any passage, spoken or written of 

whatever length, that forms a unified 

whole.Moreover, Halliday (1994:311) adds that 

the text is something that happens, in the form of 

talking, or writing, listening, or reading. When it is 

analyzed, people analyze the product of this 

process. 

The analysis of this study will mainly be 

based on the clauses. People usually communicate 

their feelings, thoughts, or expressions with others 

using language.Gerot and Wignell (1994:82) state 

that the sentence is a unit of written language. 

Therefore, it is only applicable analyzing the 

written language instead of the concept of clause 

that is being applicable for both written and 

spoken languages. Halliday and Matthiessen 

(1999: 512) emphasize that the fundamental 

element of grammar is clause and it presents the 

parameter within which the processes may unfold. 

Based on the two linguists, it can be 

concluded that people communicate their feelings, 

thoughts, and ideas in the form of clauses. Through 

clauses they create meanings in their 

communication. The whole clauses are arranged in 

the form of a text. 

This study presented seven article texts that 

were broken into several chunks or clauses. They 

were analyzed to see whether there were appraisal 

devices. Gerot and Wignel (1984: 82) say that a 

clause can be defined as the largest grammatical 

unit and a complex clause is two or more clauses 

logically connected.  

The mood element consists of two parts, the 

subject and the finite. Hence, the following two 



 

Mohamad Wigunadi / English Education Journal 4 (1) (2014) 

 

55 

 

sections are about structure of the mood and 

meaning of subject and finite. 

Halliday (1994: 68-71) points out that when 

we use language to interact, one of the thing we 

are doing is establishing a relationship between 

the person speaking now and the person who will 

probably speak next. According to Eggins (1994: 

156), there are two essential functional 

constituents of mood components of a clause: a 

subject and a finite. 

Attitude as Martin and Rose (3003: 24-25) 

explain, consists of three main types: resourcing 

for expressing feeling which is known as 

affect,resources for judging character which is 

considered as judgement, and resources for 

valuing the worth of things which is called as 

appreciation. 

Ideology is a set of beliefs, values, and 

opinions that shapes the way of a person or group 

such as social class thinks, acts, and understands 

the world (Microsoft® Encarta® 2009). According 

to Fairclough (1995: 71) ideology is located 

indiscursive event. This has the virtue of 

epresenting ideology as process which goes on in 

events, and it permits transformation and fluidity 

to be hihlighted. But it can lead to an illusory view 

of discourse as a free process of formation unless 

there are simultaneous emphaes on structures. 

There is a textual variant of this location: 

ideologies reside in texts. While it is true that 

forms and content of texts do bear the imprint of 

ideological process and structures, it is not 

possible to ‘read off’ ideogies from texts. This is 

because meanings are produced through 

interpretation, and because ideological processes 

appertain to discourse as whole social events – 

they are processes between people – not the texts 

which areproduced, distributed and interpreted as 

moments of such events. According to Van Dijk 

(2001: 11) the usual approach to ideolgy is to 

study its effects on discourse forms and meanings, 

and how disscursive structures may in turn 

contribute to the formation and transformation of 

ideologies. However, ideologies are also at play 

when language users engage in the ongoing 

construction of context as subjective, as well as 

group sensitive, interpretation of the social 

situation. 

Eggins (1994: 26-27) devides the kinds of 

genre into many different types as there are 

rocognizable social activity types in our culture. 

There are: literary genres, popular written genres, 

and educational genres. Literary genres consist of 

short stories, romantic novels, whodunnits, autho 

graphies, balads, sonnets, fables, tragedies, 

sitcoms. Poular written genres comprise of 

instructional manuals, newspaper articles, 

magazine reports, recipes. While educational 

genres involve lectures, report/essay writings, 

leading seminars, examinations, text-book 

writings. 

Thus, the newspaper articles belong to the 

kind of genre which exists in the social activities. 

The study of article texts is closely linked to the 

parts of register, namely tenor and field of the text. 

Research in tenor seeks to understand the 

evaluation the kinds of attitudes that are 

negotiated in the text. 

 

METHOD 

 

This study is discourse analysis. The design 

of this kind of research based on the model 

suggested by Martin and Rose (2003). It 

implemented qualitative and descriptive of 

investigation. Qualitative approach or method was 

used to uncover appraisal devices embedded in the 

text, while descriptive method was employed do 

describe the realization of the appraisal devices 

found in the text. 

The data of this study are article texts taken 

from the Jakarta Post from 2002 to 2011 through 

downloading from the internet.  

In this study the article texts were analyzed 

by using appraisal systems which is introduced by 

Martin and Rose (2003: 43) and the model of 



 

Mohamad Wigunadi / English Education Journal 4 (1) (2014) 

 

56 

 

analysis introduced by White (2001: 1), and the 

process of analysis was (a) Reading the text as a 

whole to have complete understanding and to 

make it easy for the next steps, (b) The texts are 

separated into clauses and rewriting them in the 

analyzing tables each of them is facilitated with 

columns for putting the appraising items, 

categorization of each appraisal device, and the 

appraised. The process of analysis includes the 

analysis of text based on the system of attitude 

(affect, judgement, and appreciation), the system 

of amplification (force and focus), and the system 

of sources (monogloss and heterogloss), (c) 

Encoding the appraising lexis by using bold for 

affection, italic for judgement, and underlined for 

appreciation; bold and italic for forcing graduation, 

bold and underlined for focusing graduation;  italic 

and underlined for heterogloss engagement, bold 

and italic and underlined for monogloss 

engagement, (d) Cross symbol (X) is put to encode 

the process in the appropriate row, finally (e)the 

results of the analysis are to interpret and to draw 

the conclusion. 

 

FINDINGS AND THE INTERPRETATIONS 

 

The finding data of analysis based on the 

system of affect indicated that from 261 clauses, 

the positive affect was 105 (40.23%) and the 

negative affect was 156 (59.77%).  

The analysis based on the system of 

judgementfound there are 49 clauses evaluating 

people’s character. This number consists of 20 

(40.82%) positive judgements and 29 (59.18%) 

negative judgements.Accordingly, the analysis 

shows that there is almost balance between 

positive and negative  judgements of the people. 

The analysis on the texts based on the 

system of appreciation indicated that there are 138 

clauses under the analysis made of 49 (35.51%) 

clauses are positive and 89 (64.49%) are negative. 

Table below shows more detail about the data. 

Analysis the clauses based on the 

amplificationfound that there are 296 clauses 

expressing attitudes, while 104 (35.14%) of them 

are amplified by using system of amplification. It 

can be interpreted that the writers of the texts 

tended to use intensifiers (89.87%) in amplifying 

the force than other devices such as attitudinal 

lexis, metaphor or swearing. While for focus 

amplification, the writers of the texts only use 

little; it is 24.04%.To show that the ideas were 

important, high grading of intensifiers (78 clauses 

or 75%) were applied. 

The results of the analysis of the texts based 

on the sources of attitudesshowed that the writers 

of the texts use more monogloss (60.84%) than 

heterogloss (39.16%). It can be interpreted that 

the writers of the texts prefered to use their own 

ideas or opinions, but still give chances or invite 

others’ ideas in forming the opinionsto give 

emphasizes that the opinions formed are more 

objectives. 

Text Analysis based on the Taxis and Logico-

semantic Relations Systems showed that they are 

573 clauses made of 306 independent clauses and 

267 dependent clauses, the rest 75 clauses belongs 

to both parataxis and hypotaxis and are not 

analyzed since they have more than one meaning. 

In logico-semantic relations system analysis, 

clauses are classified into expansion and 

projection. In expansion the relation can be 

extended through elaboration, extension, and 

enhancement. While in projection the relation of 

clauses can be wordings or ideas. From these 

findings, the interpretations of the text based on 

the analysis of logico-semantic relation systems 

are the writers of the texts use both parataxis and 

hypotaxis systems to obtain more subjects and 

more detail of ideas in clauses under discussing. 

Ideas of the clauses derive not only from the 

writers of the texts but also from others. It gives 

emphasizes to avoid the sense of 

subjectiveness.Based on the findings above which 

showed that the negative evaluations were more 



 

Mohamad Wigunadi / English Education Journal 4 (1) (2014) 

 

57 

 

than the positive ones can arise further 

interpretation that itseemed that the writers of the 

article texts did not agree with the government 

policy dealing with the existence of national 

examination and they felt disappointed with the 

implementation. 

Addressee of Appraisal Analysis Based on 

the System of Affect. There are 261 targets or 

addressees in this analysis which can be classified 

into person, thing, and happening or the 

combination among them. Target of the texts tend 

to the things categories with 162 (62.07%) 

clauses, while in the second rank of the target is 

occupied by categories of persons; the third 

category is occupied by happenings. There is no 

target of state of affair.   

Addressee of Appraisal Analysis Based on 

the System of Judgement. The objects of evaluation 

are dominated by students (57.14%) and teachers 

(16.32%). It makes sense as the students are the 

object of the treatment while teachers are the ones 

who have close relationship with the students in 

conducting teaching program. 

Addressee of Appraisal Analysis Based on 

the System of Appreciation showed that the 33 

(23.91%) targets belong to object and 105 

(76.09%) targets can be categorized into process. 

Meanwhile, artifact and states of affair do not have 

any distributions. 

The aim of the analysis of ideology is 

basically to depict the ideological stance of the 

Jakarta Post articles on national examination. This 

analysis was done by using of appraisal system 

particularly the use of systems of affect, 

judgement, and appreciation.  

Ideological stances based on the analysis of 

appraisals tend to indicate the same findings 

among the parts of the system of appraisals. These 

findings are the results of analysis covering the 

systems of affect, judgement, and appreciation. 

Each parts shows that the negative evaluation is 

more dominant that the positive one. Meanwhile, 

the ways of delivering messages, the writers of the 

article texts prefer to use direct expressions.  

 

CONCLUSIONS 

 

Based on the analysis of the selected article 

texts from the Jakarta Post towards the topic of 

national examination, it can be concluded that the 

writers of the article texts applied the system of 

appraisal covering the attitude system, the source 

of attitude and amplification.The system of 

attitude covered the system of affect, the system of 

judgement and the system of appreciation. 

While the results of the analysis of the 

article texts based on the appraisals devices 

indicated that most of the evaluation fell on the 

negative categories.  

Moreover, based on the ideological analysis, 

the writer of the texts seemed to refuse the 

implementation of national examination as the 

topic under analysis. 

Language teachers need to achieve of 

appraisal system. With this system language 

teachers are able to negotiate their ideas in the 

social relationship by making interpersonal 

meanings. They, in turn, are also able to teach the 

students to know and to use the appraisal devices 

to express their feelings (affect), to judge the 

people’s character (judgement) and to appreciate 

things (appreciation). By mastering the appraisal 

system, students are also able to understand 

others. 

 

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Gerot, Linda. and Peter Wignell. 1994. Making Sense of 

Functional    Grammar. Sydney:  

Gerd Stabler. 

Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. Spoken and Written Language. 

Melbourne: Deakin 

            University Press. 



 

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Halliday, M.A.K. & R. Hasan. 1985. Language, Context, 

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