English Grammatical Choices in Constructing Identity in Indonesian EFL Students’ Self-Introduction Writing: Transitivity Analysis

Abstract

Grammar in EFL writing can be examined not only as a matter of accuracy but also as a resource for constructing meaning and identity. Although Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been widely applied to student writing, recent studies have concentrated mainly on academic, exposition, recount, and report genres, while written self-introduction texts produced by non-English-major university students remain relatively underexplored. This study investigates how Indonesian EFL students construct personal, educational, and future-oriented identities through grammatical choices in self-introduction writing. Drawing on Matthiessen’s transitivity system(Matthiessen & Teruya, 2023), the study adopts a qualitative text-analysis design with descriptive frequency support. Student texts are segmented into clauses and coded for process types, participants, and circumstances, followed by interpretation of the experiential meanings associated with identity domains. A preliminary reading of the sample text indicates that relational processes are used to define personal attributes, material processes represent educational experience and projected action, and mental processes express preferences and aspirations. The study therefore treats grammar as a meaning-making resource rather than as a catalogue of errors. The findings are expected to contribute to functional grammar research and to the teaching of English for non-English-major university students by showing how clause-level choices shape self-representation.