Improving Village Administrative Document Preparation Skills Through a Functional Linguistics Approach

Abstract

Village officials in many regions still struggle to produce administrative documents that are orderly, consistent, and communicative. Irregular structures, unclear text functions, and weak cohesion make many documents ineffective both as public service instruments and as internal working references. This community service program focuses on improving village officials’ capacity to prepare administrative documents by applying Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytical and practical framework. The activities include mapping document needs, strengthening core SFL concepts particularly genre structure, inter-textual relations, and the three metafunctions of language and conducting guided writing sessions followed by clinics to revise actual village documents. Evaluation results show clear improvements in how participants construct texts: document structures become more logical, sentence relations more coherent, and the communicative purpose of each section more easily understood. This program demonstrates that the SFL approach can serve as a sustainable strategy for enhancing village administrative professionalism and strengthening the quality of public communication at the local level.