Writing descriptive texts is an important skill for EFL students, as it requires them to represent experiences clearly and effectively through language. However, students often rely on limited language patterns, which may affect the quality of their writing. Therefore, this study investigates the use of transitivity processes in descriptive texts written by eleventh-grade EFL students and examines gender-based differences in meaning construction. Understanding how students represent experience through language is important in evaluating their ability to produce effective descriptive writing. A descriptive qualitative design was employed, involving twelve students (six females and six males) from a senior high school in Bogor, Indonesia. Data were collected from students’ individually written descriptive texts and analyzed at the clause level using the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The clauses were classified into six process types: material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential. The findings reveal that relational processes are the most dominant, followed by material and mental processes, while verbal and existential processes occur minimally and behavioral processes are not found. In terms of gender differences, female students produce higher frequencies across most process types, indicating more elaborated and detailed texts. In contrast, male students produce fewer processes overall, suggesting a more concise writing style, although both groups use similar types of processes. Overall, the findings indicate that transitivity use is influenced more by genre conventions than gender.

Keywords: transitivity, Systemic Functional Linguistics, descriptive text, EFL students, gender
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