Syllabus Development on Writing English News Stories for Kasetsart University Students, Thailand

An English syllabus was developed on writing English news stories for the English for Journalism course in the second semester of the 2014 academic year at Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen campus, Thailand. The study focused on the development of material for writing hard-news and feature stories. The sample consisted of 154 students who had majored in English. The development and analysis of the syllabus for the course used a book titled English News- Reading and Writing developed by Peking University Press (2008). The analysis implemented current news stories in the course for their social and cultural contexts. The findings indicated that the designed curriculum worked well to some degree but that it was limited by the students’ lack of familiarity with writing news stories. We suggest various actions- 1) to further develop students’ writing ability, the lecturer should integrate more comprehensible inputs and material apart from those in the book; and 2) the news input material could be sourced from current news stories around the world with particular attention to Appraisal Framework (Martin & White, 2005) and the learning cycle proposed by the Sydney genre-based school (Martin & Rose, 1994), which are the main approaches under systemic functional linguistics, focusing on metafunctions (field, mode, tenor), the context of situation and the context of culture.