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appropriate linguistic choices, both within and beyond the sentence. The teacher also can assist them by providing students with examples of the language that the
students need to create effective texts.
2.4.1 The Concept of Schemata in Genre Acquisition
Genre-based approach gives attention to the rhetorical organization of the text and the role of schemata. Carell, Devine and Eskey in Swales, 1990:83
shows that humans beings consistently overlay schemata on events to align these events with previously established patterns of experience, knowledge, and belief.
Schemata are the representation of the addressees knowledge to understand the text. The concept of schemata can be seen as conventional knowledge structure
that exists in memory and is activated under various circumstances. Basically, a theory of schemata is about knowledge, how it is presented and how the
representation makes us easy to understand the knowledge. In the view of Cook
1989:69, schemata are mental representation of typical situation, and they are
used in discourse processing to predict the contents of the particular situation which the discourse describes. All knowledge is wrapped in unities. Thus,
schemata represents general concept in our memory related to objects, situations, events and its chronology.
Relating to the concept of schemata, the concept of genre itself is based on the idea that members of community usually have little difficulty in recognizing
similarities in the text they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such text to read, understand, and perhaps write them relatively
easily. Because writing is a practice which based on expectation, Hylland also
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adds that the readers chances of interpreting the writers purpose are increased if the writer takes the trouble to anticipate what the reader might be expecting based
on previous text he or she has read of the same kind. Therefore, schemata or prior knowledge is very important to be considered in teaching-learning process.
As schemata are needed in teaching process, one of the teaching-learning principles Hylland 2004:124 stated that is learners must have adequate prior
knowledge to enable them to learn new things. It is important to assist students to become familiar with the structure of narrative genre. Meek in Hyland 2004:125
observes that the most important single lesson the children learn from text is the nature and variety of written discourse, the different ways that language lets a
writer tells, and the many different ways a writer reads. This familiarity with genres, is gained through exposure to a range of
examples of text, and then needs to be made explicit through the teacher modeling and shared writing experience. The teachers should encourage them to read and
use examples of narrative text in the classroom the teacher can ask students to write about things that matter to them.
As we become experienced readers or writers, we begin to work more easily within familiar genres. Johns 1997:21 argues that the genre knowledge
provides a shortcut for the initiation of the processing and production of familiar written text. The information carried in the text we read or hear is rearranged in
our memories to fit in with our expectation when we learn. When we learn a type of text we fit in with our schemata structured based on previous text experience.
We build the interpretation of what we read by using more information and create what the text is about based on our expectations of what normally happens.
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2.4.2 Reading Preceding Writing Activity
