The Zine Project

Improving Students’ Skill and Creativity in Writing in English

Nina Setyaningsih, Valentina Widya Suryaningtyas and Anisa Larassati

English Department, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro

nina.setyaningsih@dsn.dinus.ac.id

Keywords: Genre-based, Writing, Zine.

Abstract: The young people’s low of interest in reading may be one of the causes of their difficulties in constructing

texts in the writing class. Students still face problems in finding or even organizing ideas. This research

explores how to develop the students’ skills in writing five genres in English by applying a genre-based

approach and how to improve students’ creativity by creating a zine as the final project. According to Martin

(2009), the primary focus of a genre-based approach is on increasing productive skills through modelling,

joint construction, and independent construction with the conception of language as a meaning making

system. After the teacher applied the modelling stage, she assigned the students to create a zine containing

the writing assignments. The zine was based on each student’s respective interests so it became the major

topic of the zine. At the end of the course, it can be seen that the texts the students compiled in the zine

reflected their skill and creativity. The result also reveals that the students have good understanding of the

social function, generic structure, and linguistic features of explanation, analytical exposition, hortatory

exposition, news item, and review genres that have been taught in the Advanced Genre-Based Writing class.

Moreover, they can expand their knowledge on how to apply different genres in printed media.

1 INTRODUCTION

Reading and writing are two important skills that can

help people to deal with job, school, and other daily

matters. They are also beneficial for acquiring

knowledge. Most importantly, reading and writing

are used to communicate. The ability to read and

write is commonly associated with the term literacy.

One of the current issues dealing with literacy in

Indonesia is that many of its youth are not really

interested in reading and writing. The easy access to

the Internet are considered as the cause of these young

people’s low interest in reading books or other printed

materials. This phenomenon also occurs in the

English Department of Universitas Dian Nuswantoro

(UDINUS), Central Java. When the students were

asked if they like reading and what kind of reading

materials they like to read, only less than a quarter of

approximately 25 students said they like reading

novels or books. The rest admitted that they mostly

read only text messages or short social media posts

online (Line, Facebook, Instagram).

Meanwhile, English is taught as a foreign

language in Indonesia. Therefore, mastering the

language will be an advantage both in school and in

the real world. In English as foreign language (EFL)

classes, students are taught English language skills

such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

Writing in a foreign language can be challenging

for students. They not only produce language but also

organize the language into a coherent text so the

readers can comprehend their texts easily. As Shaw

and Weir (in Horverak and Haugen, 2016:3) put it,

writing is a complex skill since it involves several

cognitive processes like planning, organisation,

translation, and revising.

The students’ lack of reading activities may lead

in their difficulties in the writing class. They still face

problems to find ideas to develop and to organize

their ideas in a coherent text. Moreover, they also

have to consider English grammatical structure since

writing not only involves idea organization but also

grammar. Thus, to facilitate the students of UDINUS

in EFL writing, a genre-based approach is applied.

According to Martin (2009), the primary focus of a

genre-based approach is on increasing productive

skills through modelling, joint construction, and

independent construction with the conception of

language as a meaning making system.

Setyaningsih, N., Suryaningtyas, V. and Larassati, A.

The Zine Project - Improving Students’ Skill and Creativity in Writing in English.

DOI: 10.5220/0007166302990303

In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference

on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 299-303

ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2

299

Meanwhile, there are studies on teaching EFL

writing that have been done. A study conducted by

Bastian and Al-Hafizh (2014) found that pictorial

story media for teaching recount can solve problems

in teaching writing to Junior High School students.

Pictorial story can also develop the students’ idea to

write the story and it can help students easier to retell

their experience.

Iranada Laraswati and Suhartono (2016) analyzed

the application of visual media and the students’

responses in teaching writing to eleventh grade

students of SMA Muhammadiyah Kediri. The result

shows that the application of visual media helps the

students write easily since it helps them to be more

creative in finding the ideas and developing

vocabulary.

Another research on EFL writing was done by

Ilyasa (2013). She analyzed the use of songs in

teaching narrative text through a case study in a high

school in Bandung, Indonesia. The analysis reveal

that songs as a prompt can help the students to

understand context and social purpose of narrative

text, generate ideas, enhance vocabularies and the use

of expressions, and promote students’ motivation.

The previous studies show various methods of

teaching writing in junior and senior high schools.

This research is different from the previous ones since

it explores the teaching and learning EFL writing in a

university context. This research also involves

creating a zine project that has not been done in the

previous studies. This research is interested in

looking at how zines can improve students’ writing

skill. Therefore, the result of this research is expected

to give an insight on how teaching writing can be

done in a more interesting way.

This research explores on how to improve the

students’ skills in constructing texts of different

genres in the Advanced Genre-Based Writing class.

In addition, since the traditional writing class usually

only requires students to submit texts in the form of

paper, this research also proposed a final project that

might attract students’ interests. This class required

the students to make a final project in the form of

personal zines that were based on each student’s

respective interest. By creating these zines, the

students are expected to be able to construct texts of

specific topics in five different genres in English and

to improve their creativity.

Zine is defined as personal magazine created and

published independently and is usually single-

authored and presented in a form of creative

publication (Jacobi, 2007). Zine is mostly designed to

catch the readers’ interest through its layout. Thus,

employing individual zine project for writing class

encourages the students to be more creative as they

need to not only write, but also create well-presented

design for their zine. It also enables the students to

express their idea trough writing and composing their

personal design. In this paper, the researchers

incorporated zine project with genre-based approach

in English writing class.

To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, so far

there has been no research on the use of zine in

writing classes. However, this medium has indeed

been suggested with the following considerations:

 The zine is an intriguing multimodal format.

(https://www.hastac.org/blogs/taxomania/2

014/01/28/02-using-zines-classroom)

 Students can discover a world of publishing

possibilities through zines, and zines can

help a teacher decenter their classroom and

make spaces for students to encounter the

other and to experience their own voices.

(http://zinebook.com/resource/engagingwrit

ers.html)

 Zines can be a multimodal type of writing

since they commonly include a mix of

images and written text. All of this variety

results in broad and exciting possibilities for

students to freely express their creativity and

ideas through the structure and format of the

medium.

(https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-

posts/john-depasquale/zine-making-101/)

In the Genre-based Writing class where this

research was conducted, there were five genres that

are taught. These genres are Explanation, Analytical

Exposition, Hortatory Exposition, News Item, and

Review. In the class, the teacher applied the following

steps, which were adopted from Hayland’s teaching-

learning cycle of genre-based approach (2007):

 Setting the context. This first step explores

the purposes and setting which normally

applied by a given genre. The teacher

discussed the social function, generic

structure, and the linguistic features of each

genre with the students.

 Modelling of the text. At this stage, the

students analyze the key discoursal features

of the genre by using a sample text of that

given genre. The teacher gave examples of

each genre to discuss with the students. They

analyzed the text samples to identify the

structure and the features of the texts.

 Joint construction. It involves teacher-

guided activities that discuss the pattern and

grammatical features of the genre. The

teacher guided and supported the students to

CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology

Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education

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practice writing the texts. Students

collaborated with their partners to construct

their texts based on the examples studied.

 Independent construction. The teacher

gradually withdrew her support, but

continuously monitored students’

independent writing activities.

 Comparing. At this final stage, the students

were asked to compare particular social

purposes of the genres that they have learned

to other genres.

2 METHODOLOGY

This research implemented genre-based approach in

the classroom and analyzed the students’ texts. The

genre-based approach was implemented in the

Advanced Genre-Based Writing class of English

Department, Faculty of Humanities of UDINUS. It

was conducted in the fourth semester class from

March to July 2017. After implementing the genre-

based approach in the classroom, the teacher asked

the students to create a zine as a final project. The

texts analysis was conducted by taking 25 zines as

data samples. After that, the linguistic features and

the generic structured were analyzed to observe

students’ understanding of those genres.

At the end of the project, the researchers

distributed an online questionnaire to elicit students’

feedback on the zine project. The questions include

whether they felt challenged by the project and

whether the course successfully improved their

writing skills. Horverak and Haugen’s (2016) was

used as a reference to develop the questionnaire for

this research.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The genre-based approach in this research was

implemented to facilitate the students to be able to

construct their own Explanation, Analytical

Exposition, Hortatory Exposition, News Item, and

Review texts. These genres were given in 14 meetings

in one semester, each of which was discussed in two

to three meetings. As for the final project of the

course, the teacher asked the students to write five

texts individually and compile them as a zine. The

following are some examples of the students’ zine:

Figure 1: Students’ zine project.

3.1 Analysis of the Students’ Texts

The zines that the students created cover various

topics. The zines reflected each student’s interest.

Some major topics of the students’ zine are education,

food, movie, automotive, and Korean pop culture.

3.1.1 Social Function

The students’ texts show that the students wrote their

texts based on each genre’s social function. Some

examples can be seen in the following table:

Table 1: Social functions.

Title Genre Social Function

The

Transformation

of Milk into

Cheese

Explanation to explain the

process of making

cheese from milk

The role of

rating in K-

Drama

Analytical

Exposition

to persuade the

reader about the

importance of

viewers’ rating in K-

Drama

Planting Trees

Now, Saving

the World

Late

Hortatory

Exposition

to persuade the

reader to take action

to planting trees to

save the world

Torrential Rain

Triggers Flood

in Brebes

News Item to inform the readers

about the torrential

rain in Brebes that

triggers floo

The Perfect

Collab

Review to give critique of

the Chainsmokers

and Coldplay’s song

Something Just Like

This

The Zine Project - Improving Students’ Skill and Creativity in Writing in English

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3.1.2 Generic Structure

In terms of each genre’s generic structure, the

students were able to organize their ideas. They have

already followed the generic structure of the five

genres. An example of the student’s Review genre

text is presented below:

 Title: Disaster From Underground: Volcano

 Orientation: Volcano is a 1997 American

natural disaster film directed by Mick

Jackson and produced by Andrew Z Davis.

 Interpretative Recount: At Los Angeles, an

earthquake strikes, the director of the city’s

office of Emergency Management, Michele

Roark (Tommy Lee Jones) insist on coming

to work to help out with the crisis

 Evaluation: This movie was very intense and

make people who watched it hold their

breath

 Evaluation Summation: Rating : 2/5

3.1.3 Linguistic Features

Each genre has different linguistic features. The

students were already aware of this as reflected in

their texts. The following excerpt demonstrate the

student’s understanding of Explanation genre’s

linguistic features.

 Use of present tense: Yogurt is usually made

from cow’s milk.

 Use of passive voice: Milk is heated to 80

degrees Celsius for 80 minutes.

 Usually the subject is not human: Yogurt is

milk made through the process of bacterial

fermentation.

 Use of action verbs to explain cause: The

fermentation process is carried out in the

incubator.

 Use of connective to link time sequences:

Second, the culturisation process.

 Use of technical terms: Good bacteria are

Lactobacillus Bulgarius and Streptococcus

Thermophilus.

3.2 Students’ Feedback on the Zine

Project

The feedbacks given by the students through the

online questionnaire are mostly positive as shown in

the following charts:

Figure 2: Students’ response on zine project.

Figure 2 shows that almost all of the students were

challenged by the zine project. However, it did not

make them less enthusiastic. Although they had to

spend about three weeks to finish the zine, they were

very excited since it was something new for them and

the writing assignment was no longer submitted in a

plain paper. In addition, they were given the freedom

to choose their own topic based on their preferences

and hobbies. It gave them the opportunity to express

themselves through their writing and zine design.

Thus, it makes the project challenging, yet still fun

and exciting.

Figure 3: Students’ opinion on genre-based writing class.

The students’ responses demonstrate that the

genre-based approach helped the students to improve

their writing skills. The students did not only focus on

the mastery of grammatical structure of individual

sentences, but they also learned about the social

function of each text type. Genre-based approach also

helped them to understand the relationship between

the communicative purpose of the text and its specific

features. Hence, they became aware that each genre

is made for different readers, has its specific structure

and features, and fulfils different social goals.

Many studies have been done in the field of

teaching writing by using genre-based approach.

Most of them are focusing on the use of various media

such as pictorial story media, visual media, and song

CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology

Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education

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lyrics (Al-Hafizh, 2014; Iranada Laraswati and

Suhartono, 2016; and Ilyasa, 2013). In all of those

studies, the researchers concluded that those various

media significantly increase the students’ positive

response on the course. Similar to the findings of

those previous research, it can be concluded from the

results of quesionnaire response that the zine project

has also increased the students’ interest and positive

response on the advanced genre based writing course

taught in Universitas Dian Nuswantoro. This research

however, is focusing on five genres of factual genre

taught in the university context which is rather

different with those previous studies that focusing

only on one genre.

4 CONCLUSIONS

After implementing the genre-based approach in the

writing class, it can be concluded that students

understand how to write explanation, analytical

exposition, hortatory exposition, news item, and

review texts. Their texts followed the generic

structure and linguistic features of those genres. The

students are also able to develop five different texts

from one topic. Furthermore, the texts the students

compiled in the zines reflected their skill and

creativity since they are based on their own interests.

By creating zines students can expand their

knowledge on how to apply different genres in

different kinds of printed media.

It is suggested that future studies involves not only

the result of students’ writings but also the analysis of

the detailed process of teaching writing in the

classroom. The samples also need to be expanded and

more categories and questions may be included in the

questionnaire to generate a more comprehensive

result.

REFERENCES

Bastian, A. Y., Muhd Al-Hafizh. 2014. Using Pictorial

Story Media in Teaching Writing Recount Text at

Junior High School. JELT 3(1) Series A, September

2014

Boot, C. 2002. Zine: The ultimate creative writing project.

The English Journal 92/2: 27-33

Hayland, K. 2007. Genre pedagogy: language, literacy and

L2 writing instruction. Journal of Second Language

Writing 16/3: 148-68.

Hoverak, M. O., Haugen, T. 2016. English Writing

Instruction Questionnaire: The development of a

questionnaire concerning English writing instruction,

writing skills and feedback practices. Nordic Journal of

Modern Language Methodology.

Ilyasa, S. H. 2013. The Use of Songs as a Prompt in Genre-

Based Approach in Teaching Narrative Text. Journal of

English and Education 2013, 1(2), 65-71

Iranada Laraswati., Suhartono. 2016. The Use of Visual

Media in Teaching Writing. ENGLISH-EDU Journal of

English Teaching and Research. 1(1), February 2016

Jacobi, T. 2016. The Zine Project: Innovation or oxymoron.

Martin, J. R. 2009. Genre and language learning: A social

semiotic perspective. Linguistics and Education, 20,

10–21.

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