GRAMMATICAL INTRICACY IN READING PASSAGES OF THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS OF MERDEKA CURRICULUM FOR GRADE X INDONESIAN SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS OF DIFFERENT PUBLISHERS

This study analyzed the grammatical intricacy of reading passages in two English
textbooks for senior high school students from different publishers in Indonesia:
Pathway to English by Erlangga and Work in Progress by the Indonesia Ministry of
Education. The study used a descriptive qualitative method, with a document
checklist as the research instrument. The research examined the complexity of
sentence structures, clause types, and text genres to assess these materials'
readability and difficulty levels. Using Eggin's theory in the Systemic Functional
Linguistics framework, the study calculated grammatical intricacy scores and
compared the distribution of simple, complex, paratactic, hypotactic, and embedded
clauses across both textbooks. The findings revealed that Work in Progress had the
highest grammatical intricacy score (1.65) than Pathway to English, indicating
more complex grammatical structures. Both textbooks showed a predominance of
simple clauses, but Pathway to English contained more complex clauses. The
Paralympic Heroes text had the highest level of grammatical intricacy from the
Work in Progress English textbooks, with a GI score of 3.33. In contrast, the King
Arthur text has the highest GI score of 2.00 from Pathway to English textbooks.
Grammatical intricacy scores fluctuated across different texts within each textbook,
ranging from 1.19 to 2.00 in Pathway to English and 1.17 to 3.33 in Work in
Progress. These variations reflected diverse writing styles and topics and gradually
introduced more complex grammatical structures as students progressed. This
research contributes to understanding of textbook design in language education. It
provides insights for educators on selecting appropriate materials and developing
effective teaching strategies to support students' language acquisition and reading
comprehension skills.
Keywords: grammatical intricacy, reading passages, textbook