This study focuses on investigating students’ ability in writing narrative texts in Bahasa Indonesia in one of the private universities in Purwokerto, Indonesia. To fulfill its objective, this study employed descriptive qualitative research design embracing the case study approach. In this study, the data were taken from the collection of students’ narrative texts. As the framework to analyze the data, this study used the theories of genre moves. The result of this study confirms that the low and middle achievers still have insufficient knowledge in writing narrative texts in terms of the generic structure and lexico-grammatical features of the text. Therefore, they need more guidance and practice in making narrative texts. Another finding in this study shows that high achiever students have almost fulfilled the general concept of narrative text in spite of their minor mistakes in composing the texts.
Keywords: genre, genre-moves, narrative text